


Passengers

by Arelithil



Series: Star Trek: La Sirena [1]
Category: Star Trek: Picard
Genre: (Canon-Typical) Swearing, (so much swearing...), Action/Adventure, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Gen, Pre-Series, Wacky Space Hijinks, and some technobabble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:47:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23702563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arelithil/pseuds/Arelithil
Summary: When Raffi convinces Cris to take passengers on boardLa Sirenafor a two-month trip, neither of them can predict the chaos that will ensue.As malfunctions increase across the ship, Captain Rios has to race against time to figure out what is happening.
Relationships: Raffi Musiker & Cristóbal Rios
Series: Star Trek: La Sirena [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1736977
Comments: 69
Kudos: 34





	1. Setting Out

**Author's Note:**

> This is the pilot episode of a (hopefully) longer series that will take us on wacky space adventures on board _La Sirena_ , with her intrepid Captain and his newly acquired collection of strange passengers.  
> I plan to post episodes as individual multi-chapter stories, with maybe some short interludes. We'll see how it goes ;]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to my amazing Beta-Reader, Physics-advisor, and Helper in All Things Spanish, Horizon! Find her beautiful art over on [her tumblr](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/)
> 
> *Imagine Dramatic Intro Music Here*

“Absolutely not!”

“Oh, come on, Cris, really?”

“No way, I’m not doing that!”

“Why not?”

Cris rolled his eyes at his friend’s persistence. “I don’t want other people on my ship.”

“ _I’m_ on your ship all the time!”, she pointed out, no less annoyed than he was.

He waved his cigar at her face on the comm screen. “You’re my best friend, Raffi, you’re practically family. Not some tourist who wants a pleasure cruise across half the quadrant!”

“Oh honey”, Raffi shot back with a look of sarcastic pity, “trust me, if they were looking for a pleasure cruise, they wouldn’t be coming to you.”

“I’m sorry, if you’re so unhappy with the amenities, you don’t have to come onboard my puny little junker ever again.”

Now it was Raffi’s turn to roll her eyes. “You know what I mean. And don’t try to draw me into a different argument! Taking on passengers is the most sensible thing you can do right now!”

“I said –”, Cris started, but his friend just talked over him.

“You took too much of a risk with that job on Risa. If you don’t lay low for a while, you’ll find yourself in the ‘Fleet’s crosshairs faster than you can say ‘legitimate businessman’. It’s honest work, they pay good money, and it’ll take you out of that sector of space. What more could you ask for?”

“Some peace and quiet”, Cris grumbled, but he could tell he was about to lose the argument. When she set her mind to something, Raffi was like a dog with a bone, and she would not relent until he agreed to do the job. It did not help that she was right, of course. As usual. _Damn_ that enormous brain of hers! “Who are these people, anyway?”, Cris asked around his cigar, trying to sound as hostile towards the whole concept as possible. But his friend knew him too well, and she did not have the decency to hide her triumphant smile as she called up a list on the screen.

“So first we have an archaeology professor taking four students on a year-long research trip to Bajor. He works for this really small college and apparently they don’t have the money to pay for very luxurious transport.”

Cris scoffed, scrolling through the group’s profiles. Their credentials looked to be in order, though he expected nothing less from passengers who had been through Raffi’s extensive vetting process. The professor had apparently published some papers on the ethics and philosophy of archaeological exploration, which at least made him sound interesting. The students were a colourful assortment of very young adults, potentially annoying but probably easy enough to keep in line if need be. Cris nodded and Raffi swiped the names into a list on the left.

“Okay, here is a Bajoran priestess, who –”

“Next”, Cris interrupted her.

Raffi frowned. “Really? I liked her reference and she’s unlikely to haggle on the fare or complain about accommodations.”

“Next!”, Cris repeated and when Raffi looked like she was going to keep arguing, he added: “Remember a few months back when the warp engine broke down and I got stuck on that dingy space station waiting for spare parts?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, the resident Bajoran priest seemed to see it as his personal mission to save my unworthy soul. I had to listen to his blathering for two fucking weeks. If I never hear another word about the Light of the Prophets, it’ll be too soon!”

“Alright, fair enough.” Raffi swiped the profile off the screen with a smirk. “A young family with two kids, looking to –”

“Next.”

This time, Raffi scowled at him. “You know the idea is that you actually _take on_ some passengers?”

“I’m not having little children running around my ship”, Cris drawled.

“You like children!”, Raffi pointed out, but he shook his head.

“Not on my ship! They sneak in everywhere and are always in the way and touch things they’re not supposed to. Trust me, you can have kids on a big cruiser where you can keep them entertained and out of trouble, but I’m not going to play babysitter for two months. Next!”

Raffi huffed but swiped the profile away. “Okay, let’s see… How about this one? Ferengi trader looking to establish a retail business on Deep Space Nine.”

They kept going back and forth over the list for a while. Cris rejected most of the passengers Raffi had picked out from the port’s notice board; if he was going to share his ship with strangers for eight weeks, at least he would insist on people that were unlikely to annoy him too much. But they did agree on a struggling musician who had made it clear in his profile that he was happy to keep his practicing to limited hours and sound-proof spaces, and a married couple that was planning to settle in a newly established colony near Bajor. Eight passengers in all, which would fill the majority of the crew quarters and earn Cris enough money to get specialized parts for some much-needed repairs. Ian had been complaining about the power converters being about to burn out for weeks now.

“See, that wasn’t so hard!”, Raffi said with a satisfied smile as she sent out notices to the selected passengers, informing them about the date and location of the pick-up.

Cris scoffed. “You don’t have to spend the next two months with these people.” He jabbed his cigar at the screen. “If one of them stiffs me on the fare or manages to break my ship, I’m blaming you!”

“Sure, honey”, she replied distractedly, still typing away on her screen. “whatever you say. Just make sure to be at the rendezvous on time.”

“I’m always on time”, Cris groused. She looked up at him and finally seemed to take his annoyance a little more seriously.

“Is it really such a horrible idea to ferry these people around for a bit?”, she asked. “Nobody expects you to play host for them, I’m sure Mr. Hospitality will be more than happy for the work.”

Cris’s expression darkened. “Don’t make me regret this even more than I already do.”

“Come on, it’s only two months. Take it as an experiment! If it doesn’t work out, I’ll never make you take on passengers again. Deal?”

“Bah.”

Raffi gave him a warm smile. “Who knows, you might even find that you like having other people on board.”

“Somehow, I doubt that very much.”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

The sun was beating down mercilessly, boring into Cris’s eyes and making the pounding in his head reverberate throughout his body. He really should not have had that sixth drink last night, but the crowd at the bar had been raucous, and the music had been entrancing, and these Trill really knew how to mix a Denobulan Meteor. Cris was not usually one for cocktails, preferring his liquor straight up – and by the bottle – but whenever he found himself on the Trill homeworld, there always seemed to be some excuse to indulge in their more exotic alcoholic creations. Last night, the excuse had been a cocky young man who had insulted _La Sirena_ and somehow, they had decided to settle their dispute in a drinking contest. Or maybe they had been fighting about something that happened on the dancefloor. Or they had been dancing together and decided to get hammered, the night was a bit of a blur. But Cris was pretty sure _somebody_ had made disparaging comments about his ship and the grazes on his knuckles told him that he had repaid the offence in kind.

Either way, it was much too early and much too bright, to be standing outside his ship, securing the loading ramp. He just wanted to get this all over with so he could retreat to the cool quiet of the captain’s chair and enjoy the solitude of space. Except there would be no solitude, not for – oh – another sixty days or so. For what must have been the hundredth time that day, he cursed Raffi and her schemes.

“Goodness”, a sonorous voice boomed behind him. “What has the lady in question done to deserve such an epithet?” Cris flinched as the noise made his ears ring and turned around to see a man he recognized as Professor Xersan Mtumbe step off a hoversled. The archaeologist was an imposing figure, half a head taller than Cris and with a massive built that simultaneously spoke of plush, well-catered college common rooms and vigorous work out of doors. A shock of white hair and impressive mutton chops nearly hid the black spots, subtle against his dark skin, that marked the man as a Trill. He stopped in front of Cris and looked him up and down with a genial smile. “Captain Rios, I assume?”

“Professor Mtumbe.” Cris extended his hand and the other took it. “Nice to meet you in person. I assume that’s the gear you’ll be bringing along?” He nodded to the hoversled that was loaded with a small mountain of crates, bags, and boxes of all shapes and sizes.

“Yes indeed!”, the professor exclaimed. His voice was perfectly calibrated to fill a large lecture theatre which made it about two orders of magnitude too loud for Cris’s throbbing head, but this time, he managed not to flinch. Barely. “We have developed a new technology to image structures that are buried under volcanic rock – or rather, we have built on the invention of the visionary Professor K’Prz and made their scanner technology portable. The Archaeological Institute on Bajor was only too eager to invite us to support their latest dig but it does, of course, mean we have to bring in all of our own equipment.”

The Professor cast a ponderous look at the items in question and Cris used the opportunity to cut in. “I suggest we store the majority of your equipment in the cargo bay and you and your students only take your personal luggage to your quarters.”

“Of course, whatever you think best”, Professor Mtumbe beamed. At a wave of his hand, a gaggle of students climbed off the hoversled and started to unload it with a clamour of shouts, jokes, and laughter. Cris sent another silent curse towards Raffi before he grabbed one of the boxes they had placed on the dusty ground and led his new passengers up the loading ramp into the cool bowels of _La Sirena_.

The next half hour passed in a whirl of activity as the archaeologists continued to board and the rest of the passengers arrived, introduced themselves, and were sent to stow their various belongings in the cargo hold. The longer the morning dragged on, the more Cris wished all of these people off his ship. The heat and the hangover were making his head feel like it was about to explode and Professor Mtumbe’s booming voice, instructing his boisterous students on how to properly secure their precious gear, was not making matters any better. Fortunately, the other three passengers were rather quiet by comparison.

The married couple turned out to be well into middle age. They did not bring much by way of luggage and Cris’s first impression was that they seemed perfectly happy to keep each other’s company and stay out of everyone else’s way. The musician was the last to arrive, a few minutes after the agreed-upon rendezvous, but since it was taking so long to get the archaeologists settled, Cris let it pass. The young man looked a little worse for wear himself, dark shadows under his eyes making the black Betazoid irises seem enormous. When he arrived, he mumbled a few hurried apologies and stumbled over his own feet nearly knocking over two of the students carrying a heavy (and as the professor yelled from the door of the cargo bay very precious) box between them. Cris suppressed a beleaguered sigh. It was going to be a long two months.

While their little group was loading up, the mid-morning bustle of the dusty spaceport intensified around them. Food vendors joined the omnipresent buskers and market stalls to offer early lunch to passers-by, and the sickly-sweet smell of Tarkalean spices made Cris’s stomach roil. It was high time they got in the air!

Suddenly, a pained yell sounded from the direction of the hoversled. Cris wheeled around and saw one of the students, the red-haired Trill girl, collapse pressing a hand to her shoulder. Cris could not tell if she was seriously injured but he just caught sight of a figure in a dark brown hood disappearing into the crowd. “Stop them!” Professor Mtumbe’s booming voice had a tinge of panic to it. “They took the trans-phasic scanner! It’s invaluable!!” Years of Starfleet training kicked in instinctively at the sound of distressed authority, and Cris dropped the bag he had been carrying and dashed after the thief without a second thought.

Fortunately, they had not gotten far. After pushing past a throng of shoppers, Cris saw the hooded figure dodge around an empty market stall up ahead and into a narrow alleyway and he gave chase. His instinctive decision to pursue the thief had not really taken last night’s bacchanalia into account, and the pounding in his head resounded at every running footfall. But he would be damned if he let a petty little criminal delay his departure from this hot and dusty shithole of a port town.

The alley opened onto a small street and when Cris stumbled out between the buildings, he caught a glimpse of the dark hood darting into another passage some way to his left. Hissing a curse, he set off again, trying to ignore his rising queasiness. This was really not his day. Angry shouts followed him down the street as he narrowly avoided crashing into several people, and when he finally skidded around the corner, the dark lane ahead was spinning – and utterly empty.

Cris stopped abruptly and had to take a step back to steady himself. The narrow street was a cul-de-sac. Its sides were lined with the typical leavings of city life that tended to accumulate in doorless back alleys over time, but none of the various piles was big enough for the thief to hide behind. Where the _fuck_ had they gone?! Cris’s heart was thumping in his throat and while the ground had mercifully stopped spinning, his stomach was churning uneasily. His hand went to his phaser – only to remember he had left it in the ship’s armoury cupboard, because what danger could there be in helping a handful of passengers board his ship? _Idiot!_

A motion further down the alley drew Cris’s attention. His eyes had slowly adjusted to the shadowy gloom and he was sure something had just jostled that stack of rotting wooden planks. Or someone. Cris crept slowly forwards, scanning the accumulated debris for anything that might serve as a weapon. He had barely taken four steps when suddenly, there was a rush of air from above and a heavy weight crashed onto his back, throwing him to the ground.

Stars danced before Cris’s eyes and the force of the blow knocked the wind out of him. He was vaguely aware that there was frenzied shouting somewhere and then a few loud thumps, but the street was spinning violently again, and he had to close his eyes and breath slowly through his nose to fight down the vertigo.

“Hey, are you okay?” A woman’s rough voice from somewhere… underneath him? No, he was still lying face down in the dirt. Above then?

“Hrrghhhh.” Cris flopped his head around, trying to orient himself. Hands grabbed his shoulders and turned him onto his back. He let out another groan but managed to pry his eyes open. Silhouetted against a slit of blue sky, a face spun slowly into view. Dark eyes and tan, angular features. Cris frowned as his brain tried to sort through his roiling thoughts. Something about that face was strangely familiar.

“Are you hurt?”, the woman asked again.

Cris shook his head. “’m fine.” He took a deep breath and pushed himself up into a sitting position. The spinning intensified for a moment, but he managed to keep himself upright. “Jus’ peachy.”

The woman, who was crouching next to him, rocked back on her heels and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you look the picture of it.” She glanced back towards the mouth of the alley. “The guy got away. Managed to get this off him, though. I’m guessing it’s yours?” She tapped her knuckles against a small metal case resting next to her in the dirt. It was emblazoned with the crest of Professor Mtumbe’s college.

Relief flooded through Cris’s still muddled brain. “Yeah, thanks”, he mumbled and scrambled to his feet.

“Mhm.” The young woman got up as well. “You sure you weren’t knocked on your head?”, she asked, watching Cris laboriously straighten his back.

He shot her a dark look, but then made an effort to speak more clearly as he replied: “I’m fine and I really need to get back to my ship. Thanks again for your help.”

“Hm.” She crossed her arms, one eyebrow still raised, but made no further reply. Once again, Cris got the strange feeling he had seen her before. Had she been at the bar last night?

He shook his head, trying to dispel the thought and the last remainders of fuzziness. He needed to get back and make sure no other catastrophes had occurred in his absence. Mercifully, his stomach had settled somewhat, and he managed to pick up the professor’s box without any trouble. The woman was still watching him, unmoving.

“What?”, he asked, a little more aggressive than he necessarily meant to.

“Your ship”, she said after a beat, “it’s docked at the river market?”

Cris cocked his head. “Yeah. Why?”

She shrugged. “I’m headed in that direction. Want me to carry that?” She jerked her chin towards the box.

He narrowed his eyes but tried to keep the suspicion out of his voice as he answered: “I’m good, thanks.”

She shrugged again, then turned on her heel and stalked towards the mouth of the alley. Cris followed her, still a little dazed.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“Captain! You got it back! Oh, praise be to the Four Deities!” Professor Mtumbe rushed towards them as they approached _La Sirena’s_ landing pad. “When that thief took off, I was sure that was to be the end of my research, nay, of my career as a reputable archaeologist! You have saved us, Captain Rios!”

Cris set the little box down on the hoversled and raised his hands to fend off the professor’s effusive praise. “You shouldn’t be thanking me. She was the one who saved your scanner.” He jerked his head to the woman who had been silently walking next to him for the past few minutes. He was still unsure what he thought of her but Professor Mtumbe was elated. He grabbed the young woman’s hand and started shaking it vigorously.

“Thank you so much, Miss! I don’t know what we would have done if our scanner had been lost! It would have spelled utter disaster! Please, may we know the name of our saviour?”

The academic’s exuberant gratitude made the young woman visibly uncomfortable and she pressed out “Jo Trenton” through gritted teeth.

Cris perked up. That name rang a bell as well, if only he could remember…

“Miss Trenton!” Mtumbe exclaimed, “Please, tell me how I can repay you for this heroic rescue!”

She didn’t reply right away but squirmed a little in his grip and shot a furtive glance in the direction of _La Sirena_.

Suddenly, the pieces that had been rattling around Cris’s hungover brain fell into place and he realized why he recognized the young woman: Her name and picture had been on one of Raffi’s passenger profiles! “You’re the mechanic”, he blurted out, unable to stop himself. “You wanted to book passage on my ship!”

There was an air of defiance in the set of her jaw as she turned to look at him. “And you rejected my request.”

Cris raised an eyebrow. “Your profile said you didn’t have enough money to pay the fare.”

She scowled at him. “It also said I was willing to work to make up for the difference! There is always _something_ to do in an engine room, I’m sure your crew would –”

Cris shook his head. “Sorry, kid, I don’t let anyone tinker with _Sirena’s_ engines except my mechanic and myself. If you can’t pay, I suggest you find yourself another ride to Bajor.”

Her expression darkened further, something Cris had not thought possible given she was already looking daggers. To his surprise, he found her defiant anger almost endearing, maybe because it matched his own black mood, but something about her just felt off.

“Oh, but Captain!” Professor Mtumbe was _still_ holding her hand in both of his. “This young woman just saved my academic future! Surely we can help her in some way?”

Two pairs of eyes bored into Cris’s, the professor’s with an expectant twinkle and the mechanic’s with a defiant frown. He had to resist the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose as the pounding in his head intensified. The woman had been vetted by Raffi and he trusted that his friend’s obsessive research skills would have detect any red flags. And yet…

His still sluggish mind picked up some speed and he finally realized what had irked him about this situation from the start. “How did you end up in that alley?”

The woman jerked back. A fleeting hint of guilt crossed her face, but then she extricated her hand from Professor Mtumbe’s grip and crossed her arms, hiding behind an air of hostility. “Why?”

“It’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? You just _happen_ to run into the captain who refused to give you passage on his ship?”

“It’s a small town”, she retorted, which was such a bad lie it barely deserved the word. And she knew it, too.

Cris scoffed. “Wanna try that again? What were you doing in that alley?” By now, the professor looked a little uncertain, too and his students, who had been drifting over, were starting to whisper among themselves.

The young mechanic ground her teeth and Cris could almost see the wheels whirring away behind her angry eyes. Finally, she spat: “I was following you.”

Some truth at last! Cris crossed his arms, curious to hear the rest of this story.

“I found out when you’d be leaving, and I was hanging around while you were loading the ship. I guess…” She clearly did not want to admit any of this, but after another beat, she continued in a rush: “I was going to ask you to reconsider and take me on your ship. I’m a good mechanic! And I really need to get to Bajor! So, when I saw you run after that thief, I thought you might need some help and…” She bit her lip.

“… and I might offer you a free ride in gratitude?” It wasn’t bad reasoning, he had to admit.

“I have money!”, she huffed.

“Just not enough”, Cris countered.

There was nothing she could say in response to that. A small voice in Cris’s head that sounded treacherously like his Emergency Navigational Hologram piped up, wondering if he wasn’t being too harsh. After all, she had helped them all a great deal. And apparently Professor Mtumbe agreed, because he put a hand on Cris’s shoulder and gave him a conspiratorial look. “I admire your prudence, Captain Rios, but don’t you think, in this case, we can come to some kind of arrangement?” For the second time in the span of a few days, Cris could tell he was on the losing side of an argument and he did not enjoy the feeling.

“You’ll cover the remainder of her fare, then?”, he asked Professor Mtumbe, more to save face than because he really needed the money.

Now it was the academic’s turn to hesitate, but after a beat, he nodded. “Agreed!”

Cris looked at the young woman. “Just so we’re clear, you’re not going anywhere near my engine room.”

She scoffed, but the hope glimmering in her dark eyes took the bite out of her scorn and when Cris raised his eyebrows expectantly, she gave him nod that was half a shrug.

“Then welcome aboard _La Sirena_ , Jo Trenton.”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

After that, it only took them a few more minutes to get the rest of the equipment stowed away and send the rented hoversled back to its owner. The Trill student who had been attacked by the thief turned out not to have been injured, just startled, a fact for which Cris was doubly grateful. For one he would have hated it if one of his passengers had come to harm before they even boarded his ship – and for another he could really do without any incident that gave his Emergency Medical Hologram an excuse to activate. The holo doc’s long-suffering forbearance was irksome on the best of days and this was not shaping up to be one of those. The last thing Cris needed was a condescending lecture on the benefits of synthehol.

Right now, the young redhead was sitting at one of the mess tables with her fellow students, laughing about some shared joke as if the earlier excitement had never happened. The other five passengers were dotted around the mess hall, talking or idling near their luggage, waiting for Cris to assign them quarters.

With a sigh, he climbed the first couple steps to the upper deck and turned around. Immediately, an expectant hush fell over the room, as they all looked up at him. Cris tried to remember everything he had planned to say. He was sure he had made a list at some point, but it seemed to have drowned in last night’s amusements. Oh well.

“Right”, he started off. A little uninspired… “Welcome aboard _La Sirena_.” He hesitated, wracking his brain about what to say next, but he was drawing a complete blank. All the faces staring up at him, waiting for him to hand out orders and instructions, stirred something deep in the recesses of his pounding brain. Memories of senior staff meetings, of assigning duty rosters, of crew members hanging on his every word with rapt attention… It was too much for him to handle right now. “I’m gonna get us off the ground, and the Emergency Hospitality Hologram is going to tell you how everything works around here.” He was just about to call the EHH, when he flickered into being at the bottom of the stairs. He must have been lurking around, waiting for a chance to accost the passengers. Fucking nuisance!

“Well hello there!”, he drawled in his overwrought American accent. Even just the sound of his voice grated on Cris’s nerves. “May I also welcome you on _La Sirena_!” The mispronounced Spanish was practically painful. Once he was certain the EHH had the full attention of the nine passengers, Cris turned around and quickly fled to the bridge. As he was running through the pre-flight checks, he could still hear the hologram’s remarks, floating up from the lower deck.

“… replicator privileges will be restricted to your quarters and the mess hall. There are no set times for meals, but you are of course very welcome to establish your own schedules. The cargo bay and engine room will be off limits during our journey, but if you need to access any stowed luggage, please don’t hesitate to call and I’ll accompany you. The holodeck is open for everybody’s use. Since there are so many of us, we’ll set up a sign-up sheet, so everyone gets their fair share…”

At Cris’s command, _Sirena’s_ engines sprang to life and the steady hum drowned out the voices. Comforted by the familiar noises and motions, Cris could almost pretend like he still had his ship to himself. He knew the serenity would not last, but it gave him the necessary concentration to finally get them out of the spaceport and on their way to Bajor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have a title for the broader series yet, so any suggestions in comments are very welcome!  
> (My brain keeps insisting on calling it "Star Trek: La Sirena" because that is more or less what I'm aiming for, but that title seems a _smidge_ grandiose... ;D )


	2. Early Days

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all the kudos and kind comments, I hope you continue to enjoy the story ;)
> 
> Once again, massive thanks to my beta-reader, adviser in all things physics and electronics, and gleeful provider of Spanish swearwords, Horizon! Check out her amazing art on [her tumblr](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Spanish translations (for anything that is not simply a swearword/phrase), notes on accents, and pronunciation guide at the end of the chapter!

The warm breeze carried the tolling of bells through the open window. Professor Mtumbe looked up when first one, and then a growing chorus of chimes wafted into the room. He had lost all track of time!

“Right, I think we’ll leave it at that and reconvene tomorrow morning. We have touched on some very salient points regarding Krolling’s theory of non-interference in the Constructing of History and I would like to hear your thoughts on how it relates to T’Paka’s edict of the Supremacy of Remembrance. So perhaps you can ponder that over your drinks and merriment tonight.” His students were already packing their bags and getting out of the benches amid excited chatter. You would not expect that four people could cause such a ruckus, but this little group seemed incapable of doing anything at a normal volume. As they were just about to leave, Professor Mtumbe called after them: “And don’t forget that I expect the outlines for your papers on recent Bajoran historiography on my desk the day after tomorrow!”

A collective groan was the answer. He could hear someone grumbling: “Whoever said field trips are easy A’s deserves to be buried so deep, they can’t be found with a trans-phasic scanner!”

The professor smiled. His students would have enough free time once they got to Bajor. The first two or three months of the dig would consist of extensive scans that needed at most the attention of two people at a time, leaving the rest to explore the surrounding cities and amuse themselves. Therefore, he felt justified in demanding some academic effort from them now.

Another breeze rustled the papers on the lectern. As an archaeologist, Professor Mtumbe felt an irrational attachment to his paper notes and would always prefer them to reading from a PADD – though of course, the technology did offer some advantages. For example, a PADD would never be caught up in a gust of wind and propelled through half the lecture theatre. Unlike his notes. The professor sighed as the pages fluttered down, settling near the musician, Cal, who was still in a seat near the top of the room. The young man had wandered in about twenty minutes after the start of the lecture with a vague look on his face and that stringed instrument in his hand, but when Mtumbe asked whether he needed the room to practice, he had shaken his head and sat down. Now he was staring out the window at the sunny quad beyond, apparently lost in thought.

“So, my boy”, Professor Mtumbe asked genially, as he walked over to collect his notes. “What did you think of the lecture? Will we make an archaeologist of you yet?”

Cal startled and looked up, a hint of guilt around his dark eyes. “I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I was wondering whether you enjoyed the lecture.” He smiled down at the young man.

“Um… Yes, it was… fascinating.” Cal only held the professor’s gaze for a moment, then quickly returned his attention to the window. “This place is really pretty! Is it modelled after your university?”

Professor Mtumbe noticed the obvious attempt to evade his question, but he was always eager to talk about his beloved Kairnin. “Yes indeed! This is the New Quad of Kairnin College. It was built, if you can believe it, 461 years ago, which makes it about two centuries younger than the Old Quad which is just through that archway. If you look over there…” He pointed out a tower, half-hidden behind an ancient cherry tree. “That’s the staircase on which I have my office. I always carry a holo-scan of this lecture hall in case an opportunity for some education presents itself.” He winked at Cal, but the musician was still studying the venerable sandstone façades.

“It must be really nice to live in a place like this.” The young man’s voice sounded wistful.

“Well, life in college certainly has its comforts, I grant you that, but –”

A faint, electrical buzzing interrupted his musings. Cal gasped. Professor Mtumbe followed his gaze and blanched. The view outside the window was flickering like a broken viewscreen. For a moment, the sandstone buildings, the green lawn, and the ancient tree all seemed to bleed into one another in a nauseating blur, then all the windows went pitch black. In the ensuing darkness, Professor Mtumbe groped around, trying to find something to steady himself so he would not trip and fall down the descending ranks of benches.

“Computer, lights!”, he called. Another discordant electrical noise – and then lights bloomed around them and the darkness crumbled away, leaving behind the grey, gridded walls of the holodeck. Professor Mtumbe stumbled, as his feet connected with the floor, hard. Under normal circumstances, a dissolving holo-programme gave the user enough time to sort out their limbs and come to a comfortable stand before shutting down fully, but whatever had caused this particular programme to fail must have disabled that safety mechanism.

Beside him, Cal crashed backwards to the floor with a panicked yelp. He had been sitting when the projection dropped out and apparently, he had been holding his instrument because he was clutching it with both hands now, trying to protect it rather than breaking his own fall. His skull hit the metal floor with a sickening crack.

“By the Prophets!”, Professor Mtumbe exclaimed, “Cal! Are you hurt?”

Cal groaned, his eyes screwed shut, and muttered something incomprehensible. Before Professor Mtumbe could get to him, though, there was a staticky hum and a hologram shivered into being in front of them.

“What is the nature of your medical emergency?”

“Oh, thank goodness!”, the professor exclaimed. “Are you the ship’s EMH?”

“I am.” Just like the Hospitality Hologram that had shown them around the ship yesterday, the Emergency Medical Hologram looked exactly like Captain Rios, if slightly better groomed.

Professor Mtumbe gestured to Cal. “I think this young man might have a concussion!”

The holographic doctor turned around. “Oh dear.”

“I’m alright”, Cal mumbled, still clutching his instrument as if for dear life.

The EMH knelt down next to him and gently ran his hands over the young man’s skull. As he was examining him, he addressed the professor. “What happened?”

“I’m afraid I’m not sure. The programme I was running seems to have shorted out and he… fell.”

“Hm.” The doctor frowned, but his focus was on his patient. “We’d better get you to sickbay. Do you think you can walk?”

Cal nodded weakly.

“Alright, let’s get you up then. Here, I’ll take that…” Somehow, the EMH managed to extricate the instrument from Cal’s grip and help the young man to his feet.

Professor Mtumbe followed them out into the mess hall where his students were already playing a raucous card game around one of the metal tables. He briefly considered telling them to quiet down, but there was no need. As soon as they saw Cal’s unsteady progress to the other side of the ship, a hush fell, and their merriment turned to conspiratorial whispers instead. The professor waited until he was sure the young musician was safely in sickbay, then he headed up the stairs to the bridge.

As expected, Captain Rios was sitting in his chair, reading a paper book and smoking a cigar. So far, Professor Mtumbe had not had a lot of chances to talk to the man. He got the impression their taciturn pilot preferred to keep his own company, though he had been very polite when he declined the professor’s offer to attend one of his lectures. Now, he looked up from his book as he heard the other man approaching.

“Can I help you, Professor?”

“I hope so, Captain”, Mtumbe said with a sad shake of his head. “There was some form of malfunction on the holodeck after I finished my lecture; the programme got distorted and then it shorted out. I’m afraid young Cal got injured in the commotion.”

The captain snapped his book shut in alarm. “Is he okay?”

“Your EMH has taken him to sickbay and should be patching him up as we speak.”

That seemed to reassure Rios, but he still stubbed out his cigar and got up. “I’ll look into the problem.”

Professor Mtumbe smiled. “Thank you very much, Captain!”, but Captain Rios was already heading down the stairs.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“… and they are so fucking _loud_!”

“They’re _students_ , Rios, what did you expect?” Raffi’s voice was tinged with exasperated amusement.

“I wasn’t this loud when I was a student”, Cris declared, scowling at his friend’s image on the comm screen.

Raffi actually snorted. “No, I’m sure you spent all day reading books by obscure ancient philosophers.”

That hit uncomfortably close to home and Cris decided to quickly change the subject. “Have you found out anything more about Jo Trenton?”

Raffi took a drag from her snakeleaf pipe and shook her head. “She looks clean. Or, well, normal, anyway. The worst I could find was that she got fired from her very first job after a week and was booked for malicious loitering last year.”

“Malicious loitering?”, Cris echoed. “That’s something you can get arrested for?”

“Apparently you can on Trill. From what I could gather, some well-to-do family thought she was spending too much time with their kid, so they found a way to get the authorities involved. I think she had to pay a fine.”

“ _Hijos de puta_.”

“Yeah.” Raffi shrugged and her gaze drifted to something off screen.

“So, there really was nothing suspicious?”, Cris asked, but she did not seem to be listening anymore. “Raffi!”

“Hm?” Her attention meandered back to the comm screen.

Cris frowned. His friend looked exhausted. Or rather, more exhausted than usual. They both had a fraught relationship with sleep, and he had noticed that she was smoking a lot more snakeleaf than she used to. But then again, he was not really in a position to judge. “If you find anything more, you’ll let me know, okay?”

“Sure.” Raffi hesitated and seemed to become a little more alert. She gave him a sympathetic smile. “Listen, Cris, it’s only been three days. Give it some time, I’m sure you’ll get used to having these people around. They can’t be all that bad! That professor sounds like … some very interes… debates … and if …” The screen started to flicker.

“Raffi?” Cris sat up straighter in his chair. “Raffi, you’re breaking up.”

“Rios?” The voice sounded distorted and far away. “… bad … comm …” There was another flicker and then the screen went dark. Cris swore and started typing on the holo interface, trying to figure out what had caused the disruption. Whatever he did, though, the diagnostic data always came back jumbled and unintelligible.

Cris swore again and turned around in his chair. “Ian!” The Emergency Engineering Hologram materialized in the middle of his quarters.

“What can I do for you, Captain?”, he asked in his thick Scottish accent.

“Something just interrupted my subspace link and the diagnostics are fried.”

The EEH frowned. “Strange, I didn’t receive a report of any malfunction. Are you sure it’s a problem with the system and not some form of interference?”

Cris scowled. “Does this look like interference to you?” He pointed at the unintelligible readouts.

The EEH inspected the screen and his frown deepened. “No, Captain, you’re right. It looks more like a glitch in the TX3 data conversion matrix. That would have caused a failure of the diagnostic subroutines if the underlying storage –”

“Can you fix it?”, Cris interrupted. He was not in the mood for one of the hologram’s enthusiastic lectures on the intricacies of _La Sirena’s_ computer systems.

“I’ll have to reboot some of the core systems but that should sort out the glitch. Couple of hours, maybe.”

Cris nodded and got out of his chair with a sigh. “Get to it, I’ll drop us out of warp.”

“Right away, Captain!”

As Cris was about to leave his quarters, something else occurred to him. He turned around to where the EEH was still standing, studying the jumbled data on the display. “Could this have anything to do with the malfunction on the holodeck yesterday?”

The hologram turned to face him and crossed his arms, looking thoughtful. “Well, the holomatrix shorted out because a power surge overloaded the conversion couplings. The fluctuation in energy was too large for the condensators and –”

“Ian!”, Cris growled. “Yes or no?”

The EEH looked slightly miffed, but he finally shrugged. “I won’t know for sure until I figure out what caused the glitch in the diagnostic system.”

“Right. Keep me posted.” And before his mechanic could say anything else, Cris stalked out of the room. He found the EEH slightly more tolerable than some of the other Emergency Holograms, but it had been a very long and trying three days and his patience was wearing thin. At least it was past midnight, so he would have some peace and quiet on the bridge.

Except when Cris walked out onto the open upper deck, he was greeted by laughter and excited shrieks. _La madre que los parió_ , did these people never sleep?! He looked over the balustrade into the mess hall on the lower level. The four students were sitting around a table and playing some kind of game that seemed to involve a deck of cards, a small rubber ball, and a lot of shouting. But then again, everything they did involved a lot of shouting. Surprisingly, the musician was sitting with them, though he was drumming some rhythm on the tabletop and staring into space rather than participating in the game.

For a moment, Cris was tempted to yell at them all to shut up. It was late, people were sleeping! But then he noticed that at the other table, Professor Mtumbe had involved the two colonists in a conversation over what looked like a bottle of _kanar_. So, the only person left whose sleep might be disturbed was Jo Trenton and she, Cris realized as he took another look around the upper deck, was lurking in the shadows near the transporter control, watching the people congregated on the lower deck with a dark expression.

Cris considered whether he should walk over and figure out what she was up to, but he decided to turn to the bridge instead. The transporter along with all other critical systems were heavily secured to make sure none of his passengers could mess with them, so there was no immediate danger. Still, he did not trust her, no matter what Raffi said.

Once he was settled in his pilot’s chair and had dropped the ship out of warp so the EEH could start on rebooting the systems, Cris looked over his shoulder. The young woman had disappeared, possibly gone to her quarters or slunk off to some other part of the ship. Right now, that suited him very well.

“Emmet!”, he called quietly, while he pulled a cigar from the case on his belt. The Emergency Tactical Hologram appeared, slouching in the chair in front of the ops station, and greeted his captain with a massive yawn.

“ _¿Qué quieres?_ ”

“ _¿Sabes dónde está Jo Trenton?_ ”

Emmet’s eyes glazed over with a bluish white glimmer as he searched the computer logs. “ _En sus aposentos_ ”, he finally drawled. That was something, at least.

“ _No le quites el ojo de encima._ ”

Emmet raised his eyebrows. “ _Te dije que no era de fiar._ ”

“Yeah yeah. Just do it!”

Emmet mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like an insult and disappeared. Cris felt a tiny pang of guilt about putting one of his passengers under surveillance, but it was not like he had installed cameras in the girl’s room. Emmet was discrete and sensible enough not to pass on anything that did not constitute suspicious behaviour. And if he came across the latter, it was better to be safe than sorry.

Cris leaned back in his chair and lit his cigar. The vast star-speckled emptiness of space stretched out before the windows and with his mind slightly more at ease, he grabbed the book he had left on the console and tried to escape into the heady prose of Vulcan philosophy.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Inar Ren was skipping class. He had let out a number of deep sighs and pained winces throughout breakfast this morning and then gone up to Mtumbe and asked him to be excused from lectures because he was feeling ill. The professor had made him promise that he would have the EMH look him over, but Ren knew he would never check whether his student had actually adhered to their agreement. Nothing that was not buried under a kilometre of solid rock or written in some dusty tome could keep the old man’s attention for long. And Nirill regularly missed lectures and had someone fake her signature on the sign-up sheet, and she had never gotten in trouble. True, that had been in class of fifty students, not in a group of four, but if he kept careful track of his absences and did not repeat any one excuse too often, Ren figured he would easily get away with playing hooky every now and again. All in all, he was rather pleased with himself.

Right now, he was hunched over the little desk in his quarters and desperately tried to remember what he had learned about Bajoran historiography last term. He had roughly six hours left to finish this stupid outline, or the professor would come up with some horrible ‘independent study’ he would have to do to ‘find inspiration’. Ren loved archaeology and he had been looking forward to working on an actual dig ever since Mtumbe announced the field trip last year. He only wished the professor was less obsessed with all these dry theories and endless academic bickering about obscure niche philosophy. What was the point of going on an adventure to a distant planet if you spent most of your day in the same lecture halls you had just left behind, writing essays and feigning interest in debates about the usefulness of archaeology? If it was not useful, why were they on this trip in the first place?

Ren pushed away his PADD with a frustrated sigh and leaned back in his chair. The filtered air and distant hum of the ship’s engine were soothingly familiar. His parents were diplomats and he had spent much of his youth on starships, travelling between Bajor and their various postings. They had been disappointed when their son decided not to enter Bajoran public service but to attend a tiny college on distant Trill and become an archaeologist instead. To them, the past held mostly pain. The trauma of the Cardassian occupation of their planet, the loss of family and friends… History was useful in recovering the roots of Bajoran culture and restoring what had been lost in the decades under foreign rule, but it was much more important to focus on the here and now and to plan for the future.

For Ren, who had grown up always on the move, with no consistent group of friends or a place he could call home, history had become a refuge. An anchor in an unsteady world. You could never know what the future held but dig a large enough hole in the sand and you could find out about all the people who had once inhabited this place where you stood now. Find out about their lives, their struggles, their beliefs. (Of course, whether you could ever actually _know_ anything about history was one of those horrible scholastic debates that Mtumbe revelled in and that made Ren want to punch something. Preferably the professor.)

By now, any thought about Bajoran historiography had been buried under a mountain of memories. Before he would be able to start that particular excavation, Ren needed a pick-me-up. He leaned over in his chair, balancing it precariously on two legs, and punched the sequence for _raktajino_ into his little replicator. There was a discordant beep, a foul electrical smell and then the replicator went dark.

Ren was so surprised he nearly toppled the chair. What in the name of the Prophets?

He stood up a bit more carefully than usual and took a closer look at the broken machine. On first look, there seemed to be nothing wrong except that all the lights had gone out. None of the control panels reacted to his touch, but the strange smell had dissipated, so at least it probably was not going to start a fire or explode. It had just stopped working. How strange.

A buzz in his jacket pocket made Ren jump. _Damn!_ He had set the alarm to go off fifteen minutes before the professor and the others would break for lunch, so he could make sure to avoid them or at least remember to act very sick when he left his quarters. Now, with his replicator broken, he had to hurry to get some food from the common area and then he had to continue working on his outline. So far, it consisted of a headline and the promising sentence: “ _Bajoran historiography has a long and storied history_.”

Cursing quietly, Ren rushed out of his room. The upper deck was deserted apart from the captain who was in his usual chair. In order to reach the stairs to the mess hall on the lower level, Ren had to go past him, but Rios was completely engrossed in his book and did not seem to register anything else around him. And even if he had, Ren doubted the captain took enough notice of his passengers to realize who was or was not supposed to be on the holodeck at what time. Downstairs, the older Trill couple were sitting at their usual table, heads together, talking quietly. They looked up as Ren approached, but simply nodded a greeting and went back to their conversation. So far so good.

Ren grabbed one of the cups with Captain Rios’s mermaid-design from the shelf and placed it in the replicator. “ _Raktajino_ ”, he demanded again and watched with satisfaction, as the cup started to fill. Ren did not really understand why the captain kept these mugs on display since the replicator was perfectly capable of producing tableware along with food and drinks. Maybe it was to alleviate the otherwise stark austerity of his ship’s common area. But they were large and well-insulated, and Ren liked the double swirl of wave and fishtail emblazoned on them, so they were his dish of choice.

While he was still contemplating the rack of cups and considering the best option for a quick lunch, Ren took a sip from his _raktajino_ and nearly spit it out again. “What in the Seven Hells?!”

“Everything alright, dear?” The Trill lady was looking over at him with mild concern.

“Sorry”, Ren replied quickly, “I think the replicators are conspiring against me today. This tastes like it was brewed with Cagrian pond slime!” He shuddered and placed the mug back in the replicator. The machine obediently disintegrated the beverage, leaving behind pristine ceramic. “Black coffee”, Ren tried. Once again, the mug started to fill – and then it exploded.

Ren managed to turn away just in time so none of the shards hit his face, but the hot liquid still drenched through his shirt and scalded his protectively raised hand. This time, his curse was a little more colourful.

“What the hell is going on down there?”, Captain Rios’s voice called from the upper deck.

Ren did not get a chance to answer. The lights on the replicator started to flicker and then there was a high-pitched _screech_ as one of the black glass panels split right down the middle. A shower of sparks rained down and all the lights on the machine fizzed out.

By now, the two colonists were on their feet and Captain Rios slid down the stairs from the upper deck at an impressive speed. “Are you okay, kid?”, he asked, as he hurried over. Ren only nodded, holding his throbbing hand to his chest and stepping back from the broken replicator, too stunned to talk. “What did you _do_?” Rios sounded more exasperated than angry, but Ren still had to swallow hard before he could find his voice.

“I just ordered a _raktajino_. No, wait, that broke the replicator in my quarters. This one was a black coffee.”

The captain scowled at him. “You broke the replicator in your quarters, too?”

Ren retreated another step. “I just told them to make a drink, I swear!”

Rios was about to say more, but a voice from the stairs interrupted him. “They’ve been acting up all morning.”

Everyone turned to stare at Jo Trenton, who was sitting on the top step, watching them with her special brand of annoyed boredom.

“Excuse me?”, Rios asked, his voice a lot sharper than when he had spoken to Ren.

Trenton shrugged. “Little glitches. Yesterday evening it was the sonic showers.”

Rios crossed his arms and glowered up at her. “You’re saying you’ve been noticing malfunctions for a couple of days now and you didn’t think you might want to tell me about it?”

She scoffed. “You said you didn’t want me meddling with your ship. Not my fault your mechanic’s not on top of things.”

Rios let out a string of what were probably swear words in his native language (Sophie had told Ren it was called ‘Spanish’).

“ _Captain Rios?_ ” The voice that came over the intercom sounded exactly like the captain’s, though it pronounced words slightly differently. Probably one of the Emergency Holograms, Ren figured.

“What?”, Rios snapped.

“ _I’m afraid we’re experiencing a wee problem with the navigational sensors._ ”

“What kind of a problem?”

“ _They seem to be offline, Captain.”_

Rios’s eyes went wide. At the top of the stairs, Trenton had jumped up and was heading over to the bridge. As he turned to follow her, Rios shouted: “Ian! Where the fuck are you?”

Ren realized that he had been holding his breath. Now, he let it out in a gasp and hurried up the steps after the captain. He had been on enough starships to know that an accumulation of mysterious malfunctions was almost always a sign of imminent disaster.

He had made it halfway up the stairs when a violent lurch went through the entire ship, nearly throwing him back down to the lower deck. Ren’s stomach clenched with worry. He knew that feeling as well. It meant _La Sirena_ had dropped out of warp involuntarily.

Up on the bridge, Rios was shouting at one of his holograms, who was sitting in the navigator’s chair. Trenton was leaning over the hologram’s shoulder, reading something on the display in front of him, and then she started typing furiously.

“What just happened?”, Ren asked, but his question went unanswered because in that moment there was a loud whine and all of the lights went out at once.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Translation of the Conversation between Rios and Emmet:**  
>  E: “What do you want?”  
> R: “Do you know where Jo Trenton is?”  
> E: “In her quarters.”  
> R: “Keep your eyes on her.”  
> E: “I told you we shouldn’t trust her.”
> 
>  **A note on accents:** I have seen many people write out Ian’s Scottish accent in his dialogue, but for the time being, I have decided against it. I am barely capable to reproduce my own dialect in writing, I’m sure I would butcher any attempt at a realistic Scottish one. In a similar vein, Rios and Emmet both speak Spanish with a Chilean dialect on the show and use specific Chilean words and phrases. Since Horizon is from Spain, we decided to mostly stick with her Spanish dialect even though it might not be 100% true to how these two would express themselves. If anyone has any insights on how to bring either of these accents across (or Irish for that matter), I would be utterly elated and always up for a trade of some kind! Let me know in comments ;)
> 
>  **Quick pronunciation guide** (not that it really matters, but I’m a language nerd):  
>  _Kairnan College_ \- firt syllable like “to care”  
>  _Inar Ren_ \- “EE-nahr” (Ren is his first name, Bajorans put their family name first)  
>  _Nirill_ \- “NEE-ril”


	3. Hacked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for the kudos and lovely comments <3  
> I'm very glad you're all laong for the ride!
> 
> As always, my thanks to my intrepid beta reader, Horizon, who had way too much fun providing the Spanish profanities for this episode (which is practically all the Spanish there is this time around, so there was no need for translations at the end). You can find her amazing art at [her tumblr](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Enjoy!

Cris felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over his head. Where the Emergency Navigational Hologram had been sitting at the conn a second ago, there was now only an empty chair. Jo Trenton, who had been leaning over the hologram’s shoulder, gasped and braced herself against the console so as not to lose her balance.

“What did you _do_?” Cris was surprised that his voice was still calm when he felt like screaming.

She looked up at him with a mixture of anger and panic. “Nothing! I just –”

The lights flickered back on, darker than before, as the emergency power came online. Cris grabbed the young woman’s shoulder and shoved her away from the controls. By now, there was a commotion around them. The Bajoran student and the colonist couple were on the bridge, all asking questions at once, and he heard the professor and the rest of his passengers emerge from the holodeck among worried chatter. He needed some quiet to figure out what the fuck had just happened, and he needed someone to detain that little saboteur.

“Emmet!” He waited a moment, but there was no response. “ _Emmet, ¡necesito ayuda!_ ” Still nothing. He could feel _La Sirena’s_ engine power up again, but the holograms seemed to be offline.

“Captain, what’s going on?” Professor Mtumbe’s sonorous bass cut through the general din as he and his students crowded onto the bridge.

“I don’t know”, Cris hissed through gritted teeth, not taking his eyes off Trenton. “She did something to my ship!”

“I didn’t!”, she spat back. “I had nothing to do with this!”

“So you’re saying it’s just a coincidence that the power went out the second you got access to the critical systems?”

“I was trying to figure out what is causing all these failures! If you hadn’t locked everyone out of the ship’s computers, I might have been able to stop it!”

“Like hell you would have! _Maldita sea_ , I never should have –”

“Uh… Captain?”, the Bajoran student interrupted with a timid voice.

Cris still kept his eyes on Trenton. “ _What?!_ ”

The young man pointed at the conn with a shaking hand. “I think someone just activated navigational controls.”

Everyone on the bridge stared as the holographic display sprang to life and started to run through the activation sequence for the impulse drive as if controlled by an invisible hand.

“What the _fuck_?!” Cris sat down in the chair his ENH had vacated and tried to get the interface to react to his commands.

“I _told_ you I had nothing to do with this”, Trenton hissed behind him. She had stepped up and was leaning over his shoulder now. “Don’t you have an override to regain control of your ship?”

“ _What do you think I’m trying to do?!_ ”, Cris shot back at her. But there was no use. None of the control panels or holographic interfaces were taking any input from him. He was locked out of all systems and entirely powerless to stop whatever had taken control of his ship. There was another massive jolt as the impulse drive engaged too quickly and Cris only just caught Trenton’s arm, before the young woman could fall backwards. The rest of his passengers had less luck and they stumbled against each other in a jumble of limbs and worried shouts.

“Captain!” Professor Mtumbe’s voice sounded almost plaintive. “Please, what’s happening?”

Cris turned around in his chair, letting his gaze roam over the frightened people looking to him for an explanation. Their expectant faces sent an icy shiver down his spine as unbidden memories threatened to resurrect themselves, but he took a deep breath and managed to push them back down. “Something seems to have taken over the ship’s navigational system”, Cris explained, trying to project calm. “I’m going to try and get back control, but first I have to figure out what is doing this.”

Stunned silence followed this declaration and Cris decided to take advantage of it. “Professor, I need you to take your students and Ms Trenton to the conference room. And I think you should join him”, he added, looking at the two colonists.

The Trill couple nodded, but Professor Mtumbe seemed more hesitant. “But… shouldn’t we help you?”, he asked, wringing his hands.

Cris nearly scoffed. “Do you know anything about getting hackers out of the ship’s computer system?”

The professor slumped but next to Cris, Jo Trenton crossed her arms. “I do”, she said with an air of arrogant defiance.

Cris shot her a dark look. “You’re not going anywhere near the ship’s mainframe!”

“You can’t seriously believe I had anything to do with this?!”

“I have no idea what to think, except that you have been skulking around my ship for four days, trying to access _Sirena’s_ computers –”

“I never tried to access anything!”, Trenton protested but her exaggerated indignation could not hide the guilty look in her eyes. This girl was either a really bad liar or an _extremely_ good one.

Cris almost snarled at her. “Then how did you know you were locked out of the critical systems?”

That shut her up.

He took a deep breath, trying to calm down. It was not like him to lose his head in a crisis, but usually it was only his own life on the line. Now, the weight of being responsible for nine civilians was bearing down on him and made it so much more difficult to get a clear assessment of the situation. He just knew he was not going to take any chances.

“Conference room”, he snapped at the small assembly in front of him with as much authority as he could muster. “Now!” The sparse little room off the upper deck was equipped with chairs and no access to systems more critical than a replicator, so it was the perfect place for his nine passengers to shelter until Cris managed to figure out what was going on.

Except when Professor Mtumbe started to usher his little flock towards the back of the ship, there were only eight of them.

Cris jumped out of his chair. “Where is Cal?!”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

They were all going to die. Everyone except him. They were all going to die, and it was his fault.

When the holodeck had lost power, he had followed the professor and the others to the bridge where the dim illumination of emergency lighting had mixed with the ruddy glow filtering through the ship’s large front window. As soon as he had gotten a good look at the system in which _La Sirena_ had dropped out of warp, had seen the red binary stars surrounded by planets that had exploded into large, dead fragments millennia ago, he had known where they were. Had known what had happened to the ship and what it meant. Had known there was nothing any of them could do to stop what would come next. But the general fear and agitation of the others had already threatened to drown him; better not to make it worse. Let them have their last frantic moments of trying to delay the inevitable. Some hope to cling to, before it was all over.

He had slipped away unnoticed from where he had been standing at the back of the group, next to… _(red hair like the NIRas-dogs on Altor III)_ Nirill. The lights had come on when he entered sickbay, but the EMH _(starts with “EM”… Emil!_ ) had not activated. He liked Emil. When he had hit his head on the holodeck a few days ago and when he cut his palm while trying to restring his lyre yesterday, the doctor had been very kind and only slightly exasperated. That was much better than what he had come to expect from medical professionals. So, when he had been looking for somewhere to spend his last moments in peace, he had come to sickbay.

He could feel the floor underneath him and the wall in his back vibrating ever so slightly as the impulse engine propelled them towards their inevitable fate. Not long now…

Suddenly, a woman called: “He’s here!” The Trill colonist, _(spots on her temples look like the Andorian glyphs for “BEH” and “LEH”)_ Bele, was standing in the door to the mess hall.

Cal sighed deeply. So much for hiding. This ship was really very small… Bele stayed by the door, watching him warily and behind her, he could see Captain Rios _(no mnemonic necessary for the captain)_ slide down the stairs from the bridge. He sighed again and clambered to his feet, nearly knocking over the spindly instrument stand next to him in the process.

Captain Rios nodded to Bele and then approached Cal slowly. “Hey buddy”, he said, trying to sound casual but instead sounding forced, “What are you doing down here?”

Cal forced his face into an apologetic smile. “Sorry, Captain Rios, I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

“That’s okay kid, just… tell me what you did, I’m sure we can fix it.”

It took a moment for the meaning behind the words to register. The captain thought Cal was the one who had messed with the ship! A wave of icy dread rolled over him. Well, it was probably no wonder. He had been late and harried when he arrived on the ship four days ago, yesterday he had taken a wrong turn and ended up in front of the door to the cargo bay and Rios had yelled at him about that part of the ship being off limits, and he had just snuck away from the bridge in a crisis. If any of them looked like a saboteur, it was probably him. And it’s not like this was the first time anyone had ever accused him of being up to no good, given that he was –

“Cal!” The captain’s sharp voice cut through his thoughts and Cal blinked, focusing on the man in front of him.

“Sorry?”

“What’s happening to my ship?” Some of Rios’s outward calm was giving way to the broiling anger underneath.

Cal looked at him for a long moment. He had not wished to alarm the others unnecessarily, but he also did not want to lie. And perhaps it was only right to allow them to prepare for their deaths. And to let them know who was had caused them. Still, it took Cal a couple of breaths before he managed to whisper: “Venoxi pirates.”

The captain’s eyes went wide. “Wha… Are you sure?”

Cal could barely get his voice to press out a hoarse “Yes.”

“How…” Rios took a deep breath, apparently having his own difficulty speaking. “How do you know?”

The old words bubbled out of Cal without him consciously recalling them. “ _They hide in the ruins of an ancient empire, once-great, long-since broken. Under the watchful gaze of two red eyes, within the ruins of ten fractured worlds they lie in wait.”_ There was no doubt in his mind that the old stories described the binary system of broken planets he had seen outside their ship.

Rios blinked at him, then he shouted a string of Spanish profanities that made Cal want to duck and hide.

Beside the captain, Bele looked back and forth between them, confusion on her face. “Hold on, did… did you actually say _pirates_?”

Cal nodded weakly.

Rios turned to the Trill woman to explain. “They scout spaceports for small ships with minimal security contingents. Once you get close enough to one of their outposts, they hijack your systems so they can waylay you and strip your ship for parts.”

Bele looked to Cal for confirmation, so he nodded again. Her mouth pressed into a hard line. “What do they do with the ship’s crew?”

Rios raised his eyebrows at her. “What do you think? They leave no survivors.”

“Except for any telepaths on board. Those they kidnap and enslave.” The hollow sound of his own voice startled Cal and he bit his lip as the other two stared at him in alarm.

There was no such thing as a bogey man on Betazed. What was the point in trying to scare your children with made-up monsters when they could always tell if you were lying? But scary stories were still an important part of every Betazoid’s childhood and knowing that the horror was real – or at least the narrator believed it to be real – added a certain thrill to them. Stories of Venoxi pirates had always been a favourite among Cal’s friends. They described the terrible fate awaiting any Vulcan or Betazoid who was unlucky enough to end up in their clutches with gleeful, horrid detail and revelled in the telepathically shared fear and excitement. Cal had never understood it. And the stories had stopped abruptly, when a girl from their class had gone on a trip with her parents – and never returned.

Nobody survived the Venoxi. When a ship was taken over by the pirates, all hope was lost. What little was known about them stemmed from the extremely rare telepaths who managed to escape their captors – but they never escaped the captivity in their own broken minds. Nobody survived the Venoxi. At least not for long.

Bele and the captain were still staring at him.

Cal swallowed hard. “They probably targeted _La Sirena_ because they saw that you had a telepath…” His voice caught and he had to look down, no longer able to meet their eyes. “…that you had… me on board. I’m so sorry.”

_“¡Me cago en todos sus muertos!”_ Rios slammed his fist on an instrument stand and Cal flinched back. But the captain was right to rage at him. He had doomed them all.

Bele came a few steps towards him. When she spoke, her usually so calm voice sounded worried, and Cal could not blame her. “What else can you tell us about these… pirates? Do you know how they take control of a ship?”

Cal shook his head still looking at his feet. “I’m so sorry”, he whispered again. Then he took a shuddering breath and added: “It’s all my fault. I wish I could spare you all somehow, but the Venoxi never leave any survivors.” He shook his head. “If I thought there was any chance they might let you live if you handed me over, I would have already sent them a message to give myself up, but they’d kill you all anyway. I’m so –” He did not get to finish that sentence.

Captain Rios was in front of him with two quick steps and roughly grabbed his arms. “Don’t you _ever_ say anything like that again, do you hear me? Hey, look at me!” Cal looked up at him, utterly stunned. The captain’s eyes were ablaze with anger, but not anger at him. “Nobody on my ship is going to even consider handing themselves over to bloodthirsty space pirates! If these depraved monsters want you, they’ll have to go through me first. You got that?”

Cal nodded, slightly dazed by the captain’s fierce protectiveness. He had gotten the impression that Rios did not care very much for any of them, but clearly, he had been wrong.

“Good”, Rios said gruffly and let go of him again. “So, now that we know what’s happening, how do we stop it?”

Something in the way the captain looked at him made Cal want to stand up straighter and wrack his brain to find every last bit of information he had on the Venoxi… Wait… he had thought about them only a few days before, hadn’t he? He had been playing cards with the students and then… “I think we should ask… um…” Come on, he _knew_ this one! _BajoRAN, last name ends with the same letter the first name starts with…_ “Inar Ren!”

Bele cocked her head, frowning. “What does he have to do with this?”

“He mentioned something about being on a ship that was hacked near the Sorellis cluster. That region’s notorious for being a Venoxi hunting ground.”

Rios gave him a grim nod. “Alright, let’s go!”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“Venoxi Pirates? You’re sure?” Ren could not help but sound sceptical.

“It’s our working theory”, Rios replied. “Cal recognized the system outside from stories about them and apparently, this kind of hack fits their MO perfectly.”

At the other end of the room, Jo Trenton huffed and crossed her arms.

Rios shot her a quick look, but then he trained his dark eyes back on Ren. “Cal also says you’ve encountered them before?”

Ren let out a long breath. “Um… maybe… I mean… When I was travelling with my parents, our ship got taken over and nearly raided once. But… I was six at the time, I don’t really remember much.”

Rios looked like he was about to curse but managed to control himself. “Well, try! Any little detail might give us crucial information!”

“Um…” Ren tried to think back. He occasionally told the story to impress new acquaintances, but over the years the exact series of events had gotten somewhat muddled together with fanciful embellishments. “We were… leaving a small settlement somewhere just outside the Sorellis sector. We were on a little trading ship, I think. A couple of days after we left the planet, our systems started malfunctioning and then our navigation was taken over, just like _La Sirena’s_.” He tugged on his earring, trying to concentrate. “We managed to send out a distress call by rigging some spare parts together and a Vulcan science vessel in the region came to help us. I think… yeah, they found something attached to our hull, some piece of technology that was spreading malware into the ship’s computer. I don’t really remember what they did about it, though, only that we got away at the very last minute.” Ren shrugged apologetically.

Captain Rios had crossed his arms and seemed to be thinking hard. “We ran a full diagnostic scan of the ship last night; it didn’t find anything out of the ordinary on our hull.”

“Did you use any high-frequency modulating bands?” Trenton came over from where she had been pacing in the back of the room. There was an eagerness to her usually so sullen expression. Across the table from Ren, Sophie Delon perked up and watched the two with growing interest.

Rios frowned. “We used the standard specs for organic materials, foreign inorganic objects and energy fluctuation. Why?”

“Well, if I were a pirate”, Rios scoffed, but Trenton continued, undeterred: “If I wanted to attach some secret device to a ship, I would use a tritanium alloy that’s close enough in composition to the hull that it won’t attract immediate attention and that has some material mixed in that deflects standard scanner bands. You’d never find it unless you knew what to look for.”

Captain Rios considered this for a moment, but then he shook his head. “It’s a solid theory, kid, but unless we can get access to the ship’s systems, we won’t be able to do any scans of the hull, high-frequency or otherwise.”

“But _we_ might.” As one, everybody turned to stare at Sophie, who was leaning forward in her chair. She looked to Mtumbe for confirmation. “Won’t we, Professor?”

The old man startled, but then his eyes went wide with excitement. “Ooooh, you mean…”

“Yes! If we added the new RK-modulator and set the parameters to close-range…”

“We might have trouble distinguishing signatures as closely-related as these.”

“But if we calibrated it against standard alloy and shifted the variance for age along the Maier-curve –”

“And added a K’Prz calculation for inorganic residue, of course!”

“Yes, that would make it even more accurate! We’d just have to ensure the generator output is steady enough to sustain the limited field and –”

“Yes, yes! We could compensate by substituting the ceramic capacitors with mica ones, that should suffice!”

They beamed at each other like children who had found a hidden stash of _jumja_ sticks. Professor Mtumbe turned to Captain Rios. “We need to get into cargo bay!”

The captain was decidedly less amused. “What the hell are you two _talking_ about?”

Sophie was already out of her chair and halfway to the door. “The trans-phasic scanner! We can modify it to scan your ship!”

The professor nodded eagerly, as he got up as well. “It was designed to penetrate sedimentary rock and analyse the composition of buried structures. This application is a little unorthodox, but with some adjustments we should be able to identify any abnormalities on _Sirena’s_ hull.”

Ren felt himself get swept up in the excitement and he could tell the other students and Jo Trenton were no different.

“We can hook up the external imaging matrix. If we invert the projection, we can pinpoint –”

“… I think the old Mk1 myrion scanner used mica resistors, we could repurpose them and…”

“… mostly a compatibility issue, we should probably use doubly insulated wires if…”

“No, that would take too much time. Do you have a tachyon detection grid? Because…”

“ _Alright!!_ ”, Captain Rios barked, and everyone fell silent. His gaze swept over all of them for a moment, then something shifted in him. Suddenly he seemed less like the scrappy pilot of a small unregistered freighter and more like the captain of an efficient independent vessel. He turned to one of the Trill colonists. “Yarvi, you said you had some knowledge of navigational systems. See if you can find out where exactly we’re headed and how long we have to sort this out. Take Cal, he might have some idea where these pirates are likely to hide.” The colonist nodded and hurried out the door, the musician in tow. “You lot”, Rios addressed the rest of them, “get down to the cargo bay and start setting up. The doors should have unlocked when emergency power came online earlier. I’m going to try a hard reboot of the computer systems. If we’re extremely lucky, that’ll be enough to clear out any malware. If not, you’ll have the scanner up and running and we’ll have everything prepared to do another reboot once we find and destroy that device. Bele, you’re with me, I’ll need some help with the computer core.”

“I could –” Trenton began, but Rios cut her off with a single glance.

“You help get the scanner to work, the faster the better!” He looked around the room. “Jump to it, people!”

As he hurried out of the conference room and followed Professor Mtumbe and the others to the cargo bay, Ren could not help but marvel at Captain Rios. The man shrouded himself in layers upon layers of misery and misanthropy, spending most of his time reading with only a glass of liquor – or more likely a bottle – for company and rebuffing any attempt at conversation. But underneath it all, there was an astounding well of competence and natural authority. Ren had no doubt that Rios had at some point been in a position of command over a large ship or maybe a complex organisation and very likely been excessively good at that job. The man was a born leader!

Ren shook his head in wonder, but there was no time to further contemplate their mysterious captain. He had given them a job to do, so they jumped to it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative title: The Arrival of the Plot - now with 80% more technobabble!


	4. Reboot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm very glad so many people seem to be enjoying this little adventure! I hope we continue to entertain as the chaos intensifies...
> 
> Once again, massive thanks to Horizon, without whose beta-reading and encouragement this story would not exist. (Check out her art [here](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/))  
> Translations of the Spanish curses and phrases she so graciously provided can be found at the end of the chapter.

It took them less than half an hour to make the necessary modifications to their equipment. Professor Mtumbe was very proud of the way his students cooperated and helped set up the scanner array quickly and efficiently, bouncing ideas off each other and coming up with some very clever workarounds whenever problems occurred. Despite their relative youth, all four of them were highly educated, intelligent individuals and their years at Kairnin, studying the theories and technologies of archaeological field work, had prepared them well for this task.

Right now, they were all crowded around the portable generator, waiting with bated breaths as Jo Trenton finished up the complicated rewiring. The young mechanic had proven invaluable in their effort. Though she emphasized that imaging technology was not her forte, she had still come up with a truly ingenious fix for the interface misalignment between the scanner and the external projector. If anyone would be able to power up the intricately modified generator and keep it operating in the required parameters, it would be her.

The comm badge on Professor Mtumbe’s chest chimed quietly. Captain Rios had sent Bele around to hand out the little devices in the shape of _La Sirena’s_ dual swirl at the beginning of their work so everyone could stay in contact. Now, the captain’s voice called: _“Rios to Professor Mtumbe, come in.”_

The professor touched his badge to answer the call. “This is Mtumbe.”

“ _How’s it going down there?_ ”

Mtumbe looked at the tense scene in front of him. “We only need a few more minutes to start our scans, Captain, Ms Trenton is just finishing her work on the generator.”

“ _Good. Cal and Yarvi have calculated our trajectory and it looks like we’ll reach our destination in about an hour, so, you know… the sooner the better._ ”

“That’s super helpful, thanks”, Ms Trenton snapped from where she was crouched in front of an open access panel. “And here I was just thinking about taking a little smoke break.”

“How are your efforts progressing, Captain?” Professor Mtumbe asked quickly, hoping to avoid another spat between the two.

“ _Slowly_ ”, he growled. “ _But we’ll have it done in time to figure out if we even need your scanner. Rios out.”_

Ms Trenton muttered something incomprehensible, then she let out a triumphant whoop. “Got it!”

She flipped a switch on the side of the generator, flicked through the activation sequence and the machine sprang to life. All eyes followed the jumble of wires and tubes that connected the power source to the various appliances set up all around the room and as their lights flickered on one by one, they let out a collective sigh of relief. That was one obstacle out of the way, now the real work began!

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“ _¡Jodida maquinita del diablo!_ ”

It took all of Cris’s self-control not to slam the tray of data crystals shut but instead slide it back into place carefully.

“No luck?” Bele looked over from where she was hunched over her own array of neatly aligned crystals.

“No, just some long-term data storage and environmental control redundancies. You?”

She touched the tip of her scanner to one of the crystals in the array and looked at the PADD in her other hand. “I think these are the basic data-modules for your Emergency Holograms, but I can’t get a clear read.”

Cris nodded. “Their systems are somewhat sequestered from the rest of the ship’s AI and more heavily encrypted.” He rubbed his chin in frustration. It had taken Bele and him a while to get access to the ship’s computer core since they had to operate using manual overrides or occasionally brute force. None of the screens or interfaces responded to input anymore and all other ways they had tried to access the ship’s systems had failed miserably. But Cris knew that somewhere in the computer core’s data storage, there was a cluster of memory crystals containing the last clean backup of the ship’s operating system. If they could localize that, they would be able to use it to force a reboot and hopefully excise whatever had taken over _La Sirena_.

Unfortunately, Cris had no idea where precisely this cluster of crystals was to be found. He thought of himself as a decent enough engineer and he was fully capable to keep his ship in good repair, even without the help of the Emergency Engineering Hologram. He knew the engine inside out and had gotten very familiar with the holomatrix, since that was the one part of the ship Ian would never be able to fix himself. But when it came to the intricacies of _Sirena’s_ computer systems, Cris’s knowledge was a bit more rudimentary. He had been able to narrow the likely location down to a handful of long-term storage arrays in the computer core, but from there, Bele and he had had to resort to manually scanning data crystals, trying to identify the backup. It was mind-numbing, soul-crushing work, and the longer they searched, the more he felt like they had been fools to ever try this approach. But what alternative was there?

Stifling a sigh, Cris drew open the next tray and started scanning. Navigational data, communication logs, sensor calibration…

They worked in silence for what seemed like hours but could only have been a few minutes, until Bele finally called: “Here, I think this is it!”

Cris abandoned the collection of Universal Translator libraries he had just discovered and hurried over.

“I think these contain a full systems backup”, Bele said as she showed him the readings on her PADD.

Cris nodded. “And it’s from two weeks ago, before I ever arrived on Trill, so it shouldn’t be compromised!”

Bele frowned. “Can you restart the computer from a two-week-old image?”

“It’s not ideal”, Cris shrugged, “but we’ll mostly lose some procedural data. And a few key systems like life-support or the Emergency Holograms are walled-off from the rest of the OS, so they shouldn’t be affected.”

“Well then, will you do the honours?”

Cris took a deep breath, then he carefully lifted the cluster of crystals out of its storage tray. “Let’s give this a go, shall we? Warn the others!”

Bele pressed her communicator. “Attention everyone, we will attempt a hard reset of _Sirena’s_ systems. This will likely interrupt the impulse drive, so make sure all equipment is secure and you’re holding on to something!”

Priming the reboot was easy enough and after a couple more minutes, Cris pressed his own comm badge. “Alright people, here we go. Hard reset in three… two… one…”

A jolt went through the ship as the impulse drive controls dropped out together with all the other higher-level systems.

Cris and Bele stared intently at the now blank screen in front of them. It felt like the entire ship was holding its breath, waiting to see if the manoeuvre had worked.

“ _Venga mija_ ”, Cris whispered without really meaning to, “ _¡Ánimo!_ ”

A single light blinked into existence on the holoscreen, then a progress bar that filled quickly, and then a cascade of code rushed by in front of their eyes, as the systems started up again. Cris realized he was still holding his breath, his whole body tense like a tightly coiled spring, waiting, daring something to go wrong. But the familiar activation sequence continued to run without a hitch. The boot-up took several minutes and along the way, Rios entered his various activation codes. When he finally gave the computer his handprint as ID, he looked over at Bele.

“It shouldn’t need any other input from me. Keep an eye on the screen and let me know if anything goes wrong.” He turned to head to the bridge.

“How will I know if something is wrong?” Bele called after him.

Rios looked over his shoulder. “Just… If the screens freeze, everything turns off, or a big error message appears, call me, okay?” And with that, he ran out of the cramped compartment.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Cal held his breath as the screen in front of them came back online. This was it, the moment of truth. Though the Trill hid it well, Cal could sense Yarvi almost vibrating with tension in the chair next to him. They both watched as the navigational system rebooted until it showed the now familiar controls. Yarvi hesitated only for a fraction of a second before he gestured for the holographic interface to activate above the console. It sprang to life instantly.

Cal let his breath out in a tense whistle. He steadied himself on the backrest of the navigator’s chair as Yarvi started typing away on the holoscreen. “It actually worked?”

“Don’t sound so surprised, kid!” Cal jumped and whirled around, feeling a furious blush spread across his cheeks. Captain Rios was approaching from the back of the ship, his expression still somewhat grim. “And don’t get too comfortable”, the captain added, “we’re not out of the woods yet. How’s it looking?” The last question was addressed to Yarvi, who was still busy with the console.

“Navigational sensors are back online, and the guidance systems seem to be, too. Shall I try and turn us around?”

“I’ll do it”, Rios said and closed the rest of the distance to the captain’s chair. Holographic screens appeared at the sides of his face as soon as he sat down and after a few moments, Cal felt the slight vibration of the impulse drive powering up again. He still did not trust their luck. Surely, if it was this easy to shake the Venoxi, others would have done it before.

All around them, systems were still rebooting. From where he was standing, Cal could see lights coming on downstairs on the lower deck, first in the mess hall, then in sickbay, and then there was the familiar staticky noise, as one of the Emergency Holograms activated on the bridge. His dark hair, as curly and dishevelled as the captain’s, was half-hidden under a knit hat and there were tools clipped to his belt. Cal was pretty sure he had not met this hologram before, though he looked like an engineer.

“Captain, what’s going on?”, the Emergency Hologram asked in a thick accent that made it hard for Cal to understand him. “Did someone crash the main computer?”

“Not now, Ian”, Rios shot back without looking away from his controls. Outside, the closer of the two red stars was slowly disappearing from view as the captain turned _Sirena_ around, hesitant and careful.

Cal’s nerves were still tingling with worry and he jumped when, a second hologram shivered into existence right next to him. This one Cal had definitely not met before! Unkempt hair fell down to his shoulders and what was visible of his arms was covered in tattoos.

“ _¡Alguien está intentando infiltrar los sistemas de la nave!_ ”, the new arrival drawled in a language Cal could not identify.

“I know they hacked the ship, that’s why we reset the computer”, Rios answered, still not looking back at them.

“No, Captain” The first hologram’s eyes went wide. “They’re still in the system, they’re trying to –” But he never got to finish the sentence because suddenly, all the screens went dark, the lights went out, and the holograms disappeared again.

Rios swore and slapped his armrest in frustration.

“Well, I guess that would have been too easy”, Yarvi said with a remarkably calm voice.

Cal felt like the floor had opened up and he was in freefall. Against his better judgement, a spark of hope had ignited in him as the captain took the helm and now it was stomped out by the harsh truth they all should have accepted hours ago. There was no escaping their fate.

In front of him, the navigational console switched itself back on and the ship started to turn around again.

“ _Captain Rios, what happened?_ ” Professor Mtumbe’s voice came over the intercom.

“We’re gonna need to find that alien tech right now”, Rios answered as he got out of his chair. “Tell me you’re making progress!”

“ _We’re doing our best, Captain._ ”

Rios closed the comm link and looked over his shoulder. “You two, keep an eye on our trajectory, I’m going to check on that scanner.”

“Will do, captain”, Yarvi replied. Cal could not understand how the older man was still so relaxed. He himself was on the verge of a nervous breakdown; he could feel panic spreading its cold tendrils throughout his consciousness, trying to drag him down.

Even if the professor and his students could find the Venoxi device, how were they possibly going to get rid of it? And who said that the corruption was not already deeply embedded in _Sirena’s_ computer code and would simply resurface every time they tried to purge it? Nobody ever escaped the clutches of the Venoxi unless they were saved by some kind of outside intervention, and the odds of that happening out here were basically non-existent. They should just accept their fate and –

“Cal!” He jumped and stared at Yarvi, who had turned around in the navigator’s chair. “Are you with me?”

Cal nodded weakly.

“Good, because I’ve got a job for the two of us and I need your full attention because you’ll have to do _exactly_ as I say. Can you do that?” His eyes were kind and understanding, but there was an air of practised authority in the way he spoke, very similar to Rios, actually, when he got into full captain-mode.

Cal stood up a little straighter and did his best to fight down the panic. “I can”, he said quietly.

Yarvi nodded. “Then let’s get to work!”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

The holographic image of _La Sirena_ hovered a few feet above the cargo bay floor. The white-blue light did not do justice to the ship’s red and white paintjob, of course, but it was surprisingly accurate in highlighting the many subtle signs of wear on the hull. Small scratches left over from rough landings, the nearly invisible seam where a tritanium panel had been patched, accumulations of dust and particles that were common after sustained warp-flight…

Ren marvelled at the power of their scanner. He could not wait to put it to use on an actual archaeological dig! But right now, he needed to focus on the task at hand. “Omega eleven… discrepancy of… 2.09”, he called the reading from the screen in front of him to Professor Mtumbe, who typed it into the scanner’s console.

Across the room, Nirill announced: “The organic residue module is queued up.”

“Hold it!” Jo Trenton was monitoring the generator output like a hawk. Hers was probably the most crucial task. The trans-phasic scanner was meant to operate at distances of several kilometres. Running it in as narrow confines as these required a very tight control on the power. If the generator spiked even once, it might burn out all of their equipment and it would take weeks to get everything operational again. Weeks they did not have!

Every eye in the room was on Trenton, as she watched her control panel, chewing nervously on the end of a stick of liquorice root. “Hold it…”, she repeated, as if anyone would have dared to move even a finger without her say-so. “Hold it… Now!”

Nirill activated the next scanner module and a new stream of data flowed across Ren’s screen. The holographic model in their middle started to sprout little dots in orange, yellow, and green tones, painting intricate patterns on _Sirena’s_ hull.

Analysing the age of various tritanium compounds in the ships outer plating had gotten them nowhere, since there was too much distortion from recent repairs and the tachyonic effects of the warp drive. They also had not been able to pinpoint any variation in the material composition; that was probably exactly the kind of scan the mystery alloy was supposed to deflect. Even Trenton’s clever suggestion to use the less common high-frequency scanner bands had only helped them narrow it down to eight possible hotspots of irregular materials. So now they were running a last attempt, analysing microscopic organic residue left on the hull in these eight places. With any luck, the Venoxi device, whatever it was, would have traces of its owners or their habitat on it, differentiating it enough from the dirt clinging to the rest of _Sirena_ that their scanner could pick it out.

If it did not, they were out of options. And out of time, Ren thought, as Cal’s nervous voice came over the intercom: _“Thirty minutes to our destination.”_

A loud curse spilled in through the cargo bay door, followed closely by the agitated form of Captain Rios. “Update!”, he barked, as soon as he entered.

Mtumbe jumped slightly at the harsh tone, but he hurried to point at the hologram in the middle of the room. “We’re just running another analysis now. We’ve identified a number of locations where the device might have been attached to the hull and hopefully, this will yield the final clue.”

Rios planted himself next to the projection of his ship and crossed his arms. Ren watched him surreptitiously, always keeping half an eye on the screen he was supposed to monitor. The captain seemed to have lost a lot of his earlier collectedness, instead tapping a foot and scowling at the colourful floating image as if it had personally insulted him. “How long until you have the results?”, he snapped at the professor.

Mtumbe’s jaw tightened, but his voice was still even when he replied. “It shouldn’t take more than two or three minutes. The algorithm is currently calculating the average composition of organic residue and will soon identify any abnormalities.”

“Can you speed it up?”

The professor looked askance. “Captain, this is a highly complex operation! If we misjudged a single parameter, it could –”

“Fine”, Rios cut him off. “I just hope this thing can deliver.”

From across the room, Trenton was watching the captain. Ren nearly groaned, as he realized the engineer was about to pick another fight. She clearly had absolutely no sense of appropriate timing!

“Even if we get rid of whatever the Venoxi did out there, you sure you have a clean reboot?”

Rios shot her a dark look. “It got us control back, didn’t it.”

“For five seconds”, Trenton scoffed.

“Because then that device reintroduced the malware. The data crystals are hardcoded and can’t be infected, so the reboot is fine!”

“You sure? If you let me have a look –”

“Shouldn’t you be paying attention to something over there?”, Rios snarled.

Trenton opened her mouth for a jeering response and Ren considered whether he should step in, but fortunately there was no need.

“There it is!” Nirill’s excited shout made them all whirl around to the middle of the room. There, on the underside of _Sirena_ ’s hull, was what looked like a bright red barnacle on the light blue holoimage.

Everyone let out a collective sigh. They had done it! They had found the alien device! So now they could… Ren stopped short as he realized that in the frenzy to get the scans, he had completely forgotten one crucial question. And apparently, he was not alone.

“So… now what?”, Sophie Delon asked tentatively.

Captain Rios stroked his chin, thinking for a moment, then he took a deep breath. “Now, I go for a little walk outside.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Spanish translations**  
>  _¡Jodida maquinita del diablo!_ \- Damn this godforsaken machine! (more or less ;9 )
> 
>  _“Venga mija, ¡Ánimo!_ \- Come on, girl, you can do this!
> 
>  _¡Alguien está intentando infiltrar los sistemas de la nave!_ \- Someone's trying to hack the ship!
> 
> **Alternative Title:** Have you tried turning it off and on again?


	5. Spacewalk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading and leaving kudos and comments! They are giving me life and making this so much more fun than I ever thought it could be =D
> 
> A huge thanks to my beta-reader Horizon, who listened to me ramble about my limited understanding of the physics of spacewalks and soundwaves in vacuum and acceleration and propulsion in space - and then helped me out with some actual facts! You can find her brilliant art [on her tumblr.](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/)

Stunned silence followed Captain Rios’s announcement. Ren felt his heart thump in his throat. A spacewalk? Those were quite an undertaking even if you were not under imminent threat of slaughter by ruthless pirates!

In the sudden quiet, Jo Trenton scoffed derisively. “You won’t.”

Captain Rios glared at her. “What?” He was clearly trying to keep his voice calm and doing a bad job of it.

“You won’t go out there.”

“And why, pray tell, _the_ _fuck_ not?”

Trenton’s stormy expression easily matched the captain’s. “The system reboot will need some kind of authorization, yes?”

Rios stopped short, his jaw working angrily. “Bele can start the reboot once I’ve removed the device. By the time ident is required –”

Trenton pressed her comm badge. “Cal, how long to our destination?”

“ _Um… hold on…”_ There was some clanging and muffled cursing over the intercom, then: “ _Twenty-five minutes._ ”

Rios swore heartily. There was simply no time. From what Ren could gather about the layout of the ship and the location of the device, it would take a few minutes to make your way there from the airlock. Not to mention disabling the device and returning. Even if rebooting the system shut off the impulse engine, the momentum would keep carrying _Sirena_ towards her destination – or straight into a planetary fragment – until Rios managed to come back inside, give his authorization, and start up the systems again. The captain must have reached the same conclusion. “Then what do you suggest?”, he asked through clenched teeth.

“I’ll go”, Trenton replied simply.

Rios stared at her for a second. “No.”

“But I can –”

“NO!”

“Why? Because you still don’t trust me?!”

“Because it’s too fucking dangerous and I’m responsible for your safety!” The palpable anger rolling off Rios was finally enough to shut Trenton up.

In the silence that followed, Ren heard himself say: “I’ll go with her.” Everyone turned to stare at him. He had no idea what had possessed him, but his mouth had apparently developed a mind of its own, because it continued: “We got extensive EVA training when my parents were in the diplomatic corps. You never know when negotiations might break down into interplanetary incidents of the ship-destroying variety”, he echoed his father’s lame attempt at humour. Then he looked up at the captain, hoping his expression was determined rather than panicked or apologetic. “Between the two of us, Trenton and I can get this thing off the ship and keep each other safe.”

Trenton was the first to recover her wits after this declaration. “Right. We’ll need help with the suits. Niri?”

“Of course!” Nirill stepped out from behind the console she had been working on.

“I’ll help, too”, Ayame offered.

“And the professor and I will keep the scanner going”, Sophie put in, “so we can guide you to the right place.”

Ren felt a sudden burst of pride at his fellow students. They might not be the most competent archaeologists Trill had ever seen (at least not if you believed some of their instructors), but they kept their heads in a crisis and always had each other’s back!

Everyone’s attention shifted to Captain Rios, who looked caught between boiling rage and utter helplessness. Desperate as it was, this was the best possible plan under the circumstances, but the captain was clearly unhappy about it. He clenched and unclenched his fists and Ren thought he saw an almost haunted look pass over his face, but then Rios took a deep breath and just like that, the professional commander was back.

“You keep your comms open at all times, you stay tethered to the ship, and you _do not_ take any unnecessary risks, understood?”

Ren nodded but Trenton only shrugged dismissively. Rios took a few quick steps right through the middle of the holographic projection until he was towering over the recalcitrant engineer. “Is that understood?”

Trenton flinched back a little. “Fine.”

“Say it.”

“We won’t take unnecessary risks”, she spat. Rios’s steely gaze turned on Ren, who quickly repeated the phrase.

“Good.” Rios stood back. “The EV suits are in a storage crate by the airlock. Follow me.”

“ _Twenty minutes to our destination!”_

Ren’s hands shook a little as he checked his tether again. They had gotten the EV suits on in record time, but they would still be cutting it close. Next to him, Rios was adjusting the straps on Trenton’s tool belt. The two of them had been bickering incessantly since they left the cargo bay, but there was very little venom in it now. They mostly made pointed comments and yelled at each other about things they actually agreed on. Nirill, who was securing the seal on one of Trenton’s gloves, was inexplicably smiling to herself, occasionally darting glances up at the captain. When she noticed Ren staring, she blushed a little and quickly busied herself with the second glove. Huh.

“You’re all set!” Ayame clapped Ren on his back and he turned to look at her. Her encouraging smile did not fully hide her nervousness, but she tried to reassure him. “You’ll be okay! You have a ton of experience, right?”

“Sure”, Ren said. Granted, most of it had been on the holodeck and almost ten years ago, but the principle should still be the same.

“Okay.” Rios stepped back. “Helmets!” Trenton and Ren both hit the release buttons and the clear helmets encased their heads and sealed with a quiet hiss. Rios touched his comm badge. “Comms?”

“Check”, Trenton replied tersely.

“Loud and clear”, Ren said.

“Alright. Remember, don’t engage your grav boots –”

“- until we’re upright on the underside of the hull.”, Trenton repeated the instructions the captain had given them about five times now. “Yeah yeah. Let’s go!” And without waiting any further, she stepped into the airlock. Once again Ren thought he saw that haunted look in the captain’s eyes, but he had no time to worry about that. Trenton was right, they had to hurry!

As Ayame was leading him to the airlock, Nirill quickly squeezed Ren’s hand through the thick glove and Rios clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ve got this, kid!”

Ren stepped over the threshold and the inner door whooshed closed behind him. _“Establishing vacuum._ ”, Rios’s voice came over the comms. Ren tried to breathe evenly. He did not mind confined spaces, but he had always hated EV suits with their stale recycled air and the way his own breath sounded obscenely loud in his ears.

A little light in his heads-up display indicated that the atmosphere had completely vented, and Trenton announced: “ _Releasing outer door._ ” She pushed the lever of the airlock’s manual override mechanism up and down a few times and the outer bulkhead slid away. Ren held his breath as the vast, star-speckled expanse of space stretched out before them.

“ _Godspeed!_ ” Professor Mtumbe’s voice boomed slightly staticky.

In front of Ren, Trenton crouched down at the edge of the airlock and attached her tether to a hook under the rim. Then she used the pull of the ship’s artificial gravity at the edge of the door to launch herself forward and down into the vacuum of space. The short tritanium fibre tether snapped taut and Trenton’s momentum pulled her in an elegant circle around the lower edge of the ship until she disappeared out of sight. Ren had to remind himself to keep breathing as he waited, until finally Trenton’s voice sounded in his earpiece. “ _Grav boots engaged, starting to extend tether._ ”

“ _Copy that_ ”, Rios acknowledged. “ _Ren, you’re up._ ”

Ren stepped up to the outer door. His hands shook slightly as he fastened his own tether next to Trenton’s and once again went through the little circle manoeuvre in his head. It was easy. He had done this a hundred times. Well. A dozen. And never exactly like this. But Rios had explained it in detail. And Trenton had just done it. It was easy!

“ _You coming or what?_ ”

Ren pulled a very rude (if somewhat childish) face in the direction where Trenton had disappeared. He took another deep breath and whispered: “Well, here goes nothing”. And then he plunged.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

It was agonizing to watch the slow progress of the two amorphous signals that shuffled across _Sirena’s_ hull in the holographic projection. Professor Mtumbe sighed deeply and checked the generator’s status again.

Of course, this was not the first time the professor had found himself in trouble in deep space. He often got invited to conferences or guest lectures, even the occasional archaeological dig off-world, and when you spent a lot of time on starships, you inevitably experienced the odd crisis or two. System failures, near-collisions… He had once been on a transport that turned out to be smuggling medical supplies for the Orion Syndicate, which he discovered when they were boarded and detained by a heavy Starfleet cruiser.

But in all his years, he had never been in a situation like this, where young people he felt responsible for had to risk their lives to protect them all from imminent death. He could understand why Captain Rios had balked at Jo Trenton’s preposterous plan, but the young woman had been right: they had had no other choice. So, all he could do now was to support the two brave souls currently traversing the underside of the small freighter to the best of his abilities.

“ _Fifteen minutes to our destination!_ ”

Professor Mtumbe sighed and focused on the screen in front of him. Now that their engineer was on the outer hull of the ship, it had fallen to him to monitor the generator output. Fortunately, all systems were still stable, which meant he could divert some of his attention to Sophie Delon, who was standing in the middle of the room and was guiding the two spacewalkers towards the alien device.

“Okay, there’s an access hatch right in front of you. If you circle it on the left, there’s another latch-point for the tether and then it’s only a few more meters.”

“ _Got it.”_ Inar Ren’s clipped response sounded very tense. Despite his training, the young man clearly lacked experience in EVAs, but they were making good time regardless.

Next to Ms Delon, Captain Rios was staring intently at the holoimage. He pointed at something with the glowing end of his cigar and said quietly: “Tell them to be careful with those plasma ducts. They were shattered a few weeks back and we haven’t had time to replace the temporary caps.”

Professor Mtumbe shook his head as his student repeated the instructions into the open comm link. The captain had been pacing back and forth in front of the projection since he had sent Mr Inar and Ms Trenton out the airlock, but he had chosen not to activate his own communicator. He occasionally barked terse warnings or reminders and left it to Ms Delon to actually pass them along in her even, professional voice. If there was one thing tutoring rowdy undergrads for three years would teach you, it was to keep a calm, authoritative manner regardless of the circumstances.

Professor Mtumbe’s checked the generator again but his head snapped up abruptly when Ms Trenton announced: _“Found it!”_

There was a multitude of whispers over the intercom as every person across the ship breathed a sigh or prayer of relief.

“Can you describe it?”, Ms Delon asked after some prompting from Captain Rios.

Mr Inar answered: “ _Looks like a chrome-fetishist’s idea of a velocity disk._ ” That elicited a very indelicate snort from Ms Trenton and Professor Mtumbe could practically hear the slight grin in his student’s nervous voice as he elaborated: “ _Cylindrical, about thirty centimetres in diameter, ten centimetres high, made from some kind of highly reflective alloy. It doesn’t seem to have any control panel and – whoa, do you think that’s a good idea? Shouldn’t we scan it first or –”_

_“No time.”_

_“Trenton, I really think… By the Prophets!”_

Captain Rios slammed a hand on his comm badge. “What’s going on?!”

_“Um… we… Trenton has… We have access to the device’s inner workings now._ ” Mr Inar did not sound happy about whatever the engineer had done to break the disk open, but apparently it had worked.

_“It’s latched onto the hull pretty securely and there are various failsafes”_ , Ms Trenton’s voice was very matter of fact. _“But I can neutralize the mainframe without triggering any of them. Inar, hold this spanner here and tell me when that light switches off_ ”

A muscle was ticking in the captain’s jaw, but he managed to regain control admirably fast. “Just be careful! I’m going to start prepping the reboot, keep me updated on your progress!” With that, Rios turned on his heel and stalked out of the cargo bay.

Professor Mtumbe shared a concerned look with his remaining student, but there was nothing left for the two of them to do but to keep the scanner running in case it was needed again and to wait. Mtumbe briefly closed his eyes and muttered a traditional prayer to _Saint Cristopher_ , one of many ancient Terran religious icons called upon for the protection of travellers. It seemed appropriate, given their young mechanics cultural background. Then he returned his attention to the generator and continued his silent vigil.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“And you’re sure about this?”

“ _You think the fifth time you ask the answer will be different?_ ”, Trenton snapped. “ _And hold that steady! If the circuit closes it’ll blow us to pieces!_ ”

Ren hastily adjusted his grip on the hyperspanner. His heart was thumping in his throat, but he just had to trust that Trenton knew what she was doing, even if her approach to engineering was a lot more brute-force than Ren was used to. His eyes darted to where the warped piece of metal that had been the Venoxi device’s cover floated lazily away from them.

“ _Okay_ ”, Trenton announced, “ _I’m ready to attempt deactivation. We’ll have to pry this off the hull next time we reach a port, but at least it’ll stop trashing the computer._ ”

“ _Copy that._ ” Captain Rios’s voice was fraught with tension. “ _As soon as we start the reset, the two of you haul ass back to the airlock, understood?_ ”

“Aye, Captain”, Ren said quickly, hoping to circumvent any bickering.

Trenton shot him a dirty look, but then she positioned her plasma scalpel over the wires she had identified as the main power conduits. Ren was expecting some kind of announcement or countdown, but apparently that was not how this engineer rolled. Instead, she simply severed the wires, slammed the tools she was holding back onto her belt and sprang to her feet.

“ _It’s done! Prepare to reboot!”,_ she shouted, starting to head back. By the time Ren was scrambling after her, she had already reached the last anchor-point and retracted her tether, so it was tense between her belt and the hull. “ _Hurry up!_ ”, she shouted, looking at Ren over her shoulder. “ _You don’t wanna be thrown off when the engine stops._ ”

Cold panic rushed down Ren’s spine as he remembered how the ship had shaken the first time Rios had forced a shut-down of _Sirena’s_ systems, and he quickened his steps as much as the bulky weight of the suit would allow.

As soon as he was next to her and his tether had snapped taut, Trenton called: “ _Do it!_ ”

The captain’s voice answered immediately. _“Forcing system reboot in_ _three… two… one…_ ”

Ren closed his eyes and clung to the tritanium-fibre rope with both hands. An almighty jolt rippled through the entire ship and threw him forward. Without the cushioning effect of the inertial dampeners, Ren thought he could feel every molecule in his body reverberate in sympathetic vibrations and he barely registered when the force of his fall smashed his hands and knees against the hull. He did, however, feel the stinging pain running up his left leg.

“Pah Wraiths and Damnation!”

“ _You okay?_ ” Trenton had somehow managed to remain standing and was leaning down to him now.

“I’ll be fine”, Ren hissed. They did not have time for injuries!

Trenton undid both of their tethers from the anchor and then pulled Ren to his feet. His right knee hurt like hell when the grav boot snapped back against the tritanium plates beneath him and Ren could not help but wince.

“ _Ren?_ ” Captain Rios’s voice sounded deeply worried. “ _What happened? Is everything alright?_ ”

Ren looked at Trenton intently and shook his head. He could still move his knee and they needed the captain to worry about the reboot, not about the two of them. She appraised him for a moment, then she grabbed his left arm to support him and started walking again.

“ _He… got tangled up in his tether like a moron, but I helped him._ ” She did not sound terribly convincing, but Ren hoped that given the slightly staticky comm link and general stress of the situation, Rios would not notice.

To sell the story a bit more, he quickly added: “And by ‘helping’ she means she shoved me around like a rabid Nausicaan!”

“ _Less complaining, more walking_ ”, Trenton shot back, but she squeezed his arm briefly through the thick suit.

Apparently, their little ruse had worked, because Rios let the matter drop and announced instead: “ _The reboot will take a couple more minutes but see that you get back as quickly as possible. I want to get out of this system!_ ”

“Aye, Captain!”

Ren’s throbbing knee was making it harder to walk but between the constant pull of the retracting tether and his companion’s support, it was not slowing them down much, so hopefully everything would work out.

Ren looked over at the woman hurrying along at his side and nudged her slightly. As she looked over, he mouthed ‘Thank you’.

Despite the bulk of her suit, Jo actually managed to shrug and muttered: “ _Just hurry up._ ”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Cris pressed his hand against the holoscreen, waiting impatiently for the ident-scan to finish. He felt utterly useless, standing around in front of the computer core to type in a few strings of numbers and letters while two of his passengers were risking their lives clambering around the outside of his ship. They were practically children and he had allowed them to go on an EVA while he had no access to the scanners or transporters, not even the fucking airlock controls! It should be him out there right now, not an overconfident baby-engineer and a goddamn archaeology student! Damn Raffi and her hare-brained schemes! And _damn_ those fucking pirates!!

He nearly jumped when Bele placed a calming hand on his arm. “They’re fine, Captain”, she said quiet enough that his comm badge would not pick it up. “They’ll be back on board any moment now and we’re about to regain control of the ship’s systems. It’s going to be alright.” Her gentle earnestness bespoke years of experience with all kinds of crises and a part of Cris appreciated having her steadying presence beside him. It still took a lot of self-control to swallow all the bitterness and cynicism the other parts of him wanted to fling at her.

To distract himself, Cris took a long drag from his cigar and focused on blowing out the smoke slowly and evenly while staring at the holoscreen under his hand and willing the completion bar to fill up already. When the screen finally lit up and the computer’s disembodied voice announced: “Authorization granted: Captain Cristóbal Rios”, Cris was ready to punch something.

Instead he took another drag from his cigar and called: “Yarvi, are the systems coming back online?”

They had agreed that this time, Cris should stay by the computer core in case something went wrong again. Yarvi had assured him he would be able to at least turn the ship around and start getting them out of this system and as much as it pained him, Cris knew he had to delegate some tasks right now.

“ _Affirmative, Captain_ ”, the Trill’s calm voice replied. “ _We have short-range sensors, transporters, long-range sensors…_ ” There was an audible gasp that sounded like it came from Cal.

“What now?!”, Cris asked with growing trepidation.

Yarvi was still utterly composed as he replied: “ _We’ve located our destination, Captain. Sensors are picking up the wrecks of numerous smaller vessels ahead of us. They seem to have been stripped and left behind. I don’t think the pirates are here yet, there are no active power signatures or life signs, but I don’t imagine they’ll be far._ ”

“I plan on being long gone by the time they arrive”, Cris replied, trying to project confidence. “Trenton, what’s your status?”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Ren hit the release button on his EV suit and revelled in the whoosh of air across his face as the helmet retracted. Nirill grinned at them through the inner door of the airlock and touched her comm badge. “Jo and Ren are safely back on board, Captain, we’re good to go!”

Ren sank to the floor, utterly exhausted. His knee felt like it was on fire and he was drenched in sweat, but they had made it back in one piece and _La Sirena_ was under their control again! The inner airlock door hissed open and Nirill barrelled inside, enveloping Jo in a fierce hug. “You did it!”

Jo’s answering grin was pretty tired. “Did you ever doubt me?”

Nirill’s musical laughter filled the airlock like a ray of sunshine. She let go of Jo and swooped down to hug Ren next. “You were amazing!”

“I barely did anything”, he protested, but he was grinning as well. As Nirill stood back up, Ren frowned. “Where’s Aya?”

“She went to help Sophie and Professor Mtumbe keeping the scanner going. They were a little worried the generator might overload and damage the equipment.”

Ren groaned. He could imagine better ways to spend the next seven weeks than replacing a myriad of burnt-out scanner parts.

Jo shrugged. “The generator will be fine for another half hour.” She caught a look from Nirill and something unspoken passed between them. “…but I’ll go and help them once there’s time”, Jo added a little grumpily.

Ren looked back and forth between the two of them, but before he could ask anything, the captain’s voice filled the room. “ _We have re-established navigational control and will turn this ship around now. Good work, everyone!_ ”

Ren threw up his arms with a delighted whoop, then let himself fall backwards onto the floor. “We did it! We _actually_ did it!”

“You’re a veritable hero of hyperspanner-holding.” Jo’s sarcasm was mitigated a little by her lopsided grin and Nirill burst out laughing again.

“Well we can’t all use the size of our ego as counterweight to pry open alien tech. Some of us have to resort to more subtle tools.” The retort earned Ren another round of laughter from Nirill and a gentle kick from the grinning Jo. Unfortunately, the motion jostled his bad knee and he drew in a sharp breath.

Jo sobered a little. “Come on, let’s get this hero out of his suit and down to sickbay so someone can fix his leg.”

The two women pulled Ren to his feet and out of the airlock. Somehow, he found it a lot easier to walk, now that the weight of having to avert a looming pirate attack had lifted off his shoulders.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

The graveyard of broken and disembowelled starships was gruesome to behold. Even in the grainy scanner image, distorted by the radiation omnipresent in this system, it emanated an aura of terror, despair, and violent death. Cal knew the sight would haunt his nightmares for the rest of his life. Even as their ship was turning around and he saw the broken planets and binary stars fall slowly behind, he could not shake the sense of dread that had been threatening to drown him ever since he realized what had happened to _La Sirena_. A foreboding unease, taunting him for believing they might actually be safe this time.

Cal was vaguely aware that over in the captain’s chair, Yarvi was talking, but he had no idea whether the Trill was addressing him or communicating with Captain Rios over the intercom. The ghostly picture of tritanium ship-skeletons, picked clean by unfeeling predators, still loomed large on Cal’s side of the viewscreen and he had to shake himself to finally tear his eyes away.

He was sitting at the conn with navigation, communications, and sensor readings laid out on the console before him. Surely, he could find a way to get that cursed image off the screen! Cal swiped through the extensive sensor controls, trying to locate the right menu. The longer he searched, the more he realized there was an incredible amount of information at his fingertips here. Detailed maps of the varying levels of radiation in the larger region. Intricate gravitational models of the fractured planets drifting around their double stars in deadly silence. A minute analysis of every inch of _Sirena’s_ hull...

That last one caught his attention. Now that… Trenton ( _same name as the CMO on his first travel into deep space_ ) had taken it apart, the little Venoxi device actually appeared on the ship’s scanners like a tiny dark scar on _Sirena’s_ lustrous skin. Cal stared at the image for a long while, marvelling at the data laid out across the holoscreen. There was a breakdown of the disks material composition, schematics of how it had attached itself securely to the outermost layer of the hull, a graph tracing the gradual increase of its internal power, and even a link to a database entry on the type of self-healing wire that had been used in its construction.

Cal blinked slowly.

Then he blinked again.

And then he screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't come up with a fun alternative title for this chapter yet. If you have any suggestions I'd love to read them in the comments ;D


	6. Problem-Solving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end is nigh! (On several fronts XD)  
> Once again thanks to everyone who has read these and/or left kudos and comments! I will reply to the ones I have missed in the next few days!
> 
> Also a massive thanks to my loyal beta-reader Horizon, who despite having a lot of work and, you know, pandemic-related unpleasantness to deal with still finds time to encourage me, give me physics-advice and keep me well-supplied in Spanish curses! Check [her tumblr](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/) for some cool art!

Rows and rows of jagged, foreign code cascaded over the screen, infecting databases, crashing subroutines, crumbling data infrastructure and re-erecting it in in its own twisted image. And then everything went dark.

Cris felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. He was too horrified to swear, to do anything but stare at the place where the holoscreen had disappeared, taking with it their hope of salvation. They had barely had enough time to turn the ship around, let alone put any distance between them and what Yarvi had described as the pirates’ slaughter ground. If they had not been detected by Venoxi ships in the area, it was only a matter of time and then they would be helpless to defend themselves. Sure, he had a small armoury cupboard of hand-phasers and phaser rifles, but his passengers were academics, a musician and a couple of colonists. What chance did they have against a boarding party of battle-hardened space pirates? His mind was racing, frantically searching for ways out of this catastrophe, but everywhere he turned all he could see was death and destruction _and shouting and betrayal and death and –_

Cris pressed his fists against his eyes and forced himself to take steady breaths. In the whirl of panic and memories, a half-forgotten voice cut through the din.

‘ _What is the first rule of problem solving?’_

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

‘ _What is the first rule of problem solving?’ Old Commander Hayett was looking sternly at the ragged group of Starfleet cadets that had just returned from a disastrous training mission._

_Cris couldn’t remember what exactly had started the fight, but he remembered nearly punching out the smarmy third-year who had been supposed to lead their little away-team. The arrogant jerk had felt so far beyond his second-year companions that he wouldn’t listen to any of their suggestions about how to approach their task and nearly ruined their mission several times with his dogheadedness. There had been a lot of yelling and shoving and more yelling and then they had split up. Unfortunately, instead of rescuing the stranded team of scientists like they were supposed to, two of them got caught in a perimeter trap, two lost their way and nearly got crushed to death when they stumbled into an unstable ravine, and Cris and T’Priah had made it all the way to their targets only to blow up the site-to-site transporter they had been meant to repair for the rescue._

_‘The first rule of problem solving!’, the commander barked again. ‘Rios!’_

_Cris jumped and replied quickly: ‘Use the assets at hand.’_

_‘And our most important asset is? Parker?’_

_The third year ground his teeth before he grudgingly replied: ‘Each other.’_

_‘And how do we go about solving a problem?’ Hayett was clearly intent on thoroughly humiliating them in front of the crew of the small ship that had been monitoring the training mission and was now watching the cadets with a mixture of pity and schadenfreude. These were principles you learned in your first weeks at the academy, but the commander was right: they had violated every single one and in doing so, had put themselves and their mission at risk._

_Cris straightened a little and reeled off the well-rehearsed formula: “Identify the problem. Analyse it. Brainstorm possible solutions. Systematically think them through and evaluate them until you find the best one. Identify possible pitfalls. Find workarounds. Always use the assets at hand.’_

_‘So next time, instead of preening your own egos or throwing fisticuffs, remember that!’_

_Cris had sworn that he would never let himself forget this lesson again._

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

_‘How do we go about solving a problem?’_

_First, identify the problem!_ _La Sirena_ was under alien control and headed into a kill-zone where they would be slaughtered. Except for Cal, who would be taken prisoner. _Analyse the problem. Use the assets at hand. The most important asset is each other._

Cris took a deep breath and activated his comm badge. “Listen up, everyone. The Venoxi device has apparently repaired itself and regained control over our ship. We need to keep our heads and figure out what to do next. Cal, what’s our navigational status?”

It was Yarvi who answered instead. _“We’re back on course for the slaughter grounds, approximately fifteen minutes until we get there.”_

“Professor Mtumbe, can you modify your scanner to find out if there are any Venoxi ships in the vicinity?”

_“Hm, I don’t know if we’d get the necessary refit finished in time._ ”

“Try, please. Any information about our destination or our surroundings might be valuable!”

“ _Will do, Captain!_ ”

Bele gently touched Cris’s arm. “I’ll see if I can help them.” He nodded gratefully and she hurried away.

“Alright. If we want to get control of the ship back, we need to deactivate the Venoxi device more permanently, and potentially get it off the ship. Trenton, what could you determine about how it was latched onto the hull?”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Ren watched with bated breath as Jo paced up and down the small space outside the airlock.

At Captain Rios’s question she stopped short, hands on her hips, and shook her head. “Some kind of duranium tendrils fused to the outer plating. No way we can sever that.”

_“Captain”_ , Yarvi put in, “ _when Cal pulled up scans of the device, there were schematics of its attachment mechanism. As far as I could see, it only penetrated the outermost layer of the hull._ ”

There was a second of silence, then the captain and Jo shouted at once: “ _Corrosion shedding!_ ”

Jo immediately started to zip her overall back up and dashed to where she had dumped the EV suit’s chest piece. While squirming into the durafiber shell, she kept talking to Rios. “Are the underlying forcefields on an isolated circuit?”

“ _They’re autonomous safety features, they won’t be affected by the hack._ ”

“Removing every bolt would take fifteen minutes at least…”

_“Directed microcharges. They’re small enough to slide under the plate once a few key bolts are loose and they’ll take care of the rest._ ”

“Hold on a second”, Ren interrupted, staring in disbelief as Nirill helped Jo put on her gloves. “Are you talking about blowing up a chunk of the hull?”

“More like a surgical removal of a very limited section of hull plating”, Rios corrected. He was striding towards them with hurried steps, both hands full of small, black disks. “It’s a slightly desperate manoeuvre you use when your hull has come in contact with something corrosive and you want to stop the decay spreading to other parts of the ship. The breach will seal itself with automatic forcefields. It won’t be pretty, but it’ll get rid of that fucking little parasite.”

Jo looked over to them. “Those the charges?”

“Yes. Once I have them in place, I can –”

“You?”, Jo scoffed. “Are we back to this again?”

“If you think I’m letting you do this you’re insane!”, the captain stormed. “The explosion might trigger any number of failsafes. I won’t allow you to be blown into space!”

“And what if you get blown into space? How are we supposed to restart the computers without your authorization codes?”

“You’re a clever engineer Trenton, I’m sure you can find workarounds.”

“We’ve been through this!” Jo was shouting now. “I’m suited up! I know the way! And you need to handle the computer!”

“I _won’t_ let you risk your life for this!”, Rios yelled. Ren could see the captain’s hands trembling and behind his anger, the deeply haunted look was back in his eyes. Whatever was going on here, it went far beyond a simple power struggle.

Apparently, Jo had finally caught on, too, because a lot of her adversarial stance seeped away in an instance and when she spoke again, it was a simple, quiet plea: “Please, Captain, I can _do_ this.” It was the first time Ren had heard her call Rios ‘Captain’.

The two of them stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity until, finally, Rios’s face fell, defeated. He nodded and the tension broke. “You’ll need these”, he said, starting to clip the small explosives to Jo’s toolbelt. “You know how they work?”

She nodded tensely. Ren hobbled over and checked that Jo’s tether was still secure while Nirill double-checked the oxygen tank. It took only a few moments to get everything ready to send their engineer back out into the void. Before she could activate her helmet, though, Captain Rios turned Jo around to face him. He clasped a hand on the back of her neck, raised his eyebrows and stared intently into her eyes. “Don’t die out there, you hear me?”

Jo answered with a grim smile and a curt nod. Ren clapped her on the shoulder and pulled her into a brisk hug as Rios released her. “Don’t worry, Captain”, he quipped. “She’s way too stubborn to die. If the Prophets call for her soul, she’ll just gripe at them until they decide she’s not worth the trouble.” Jo boxed his side for that, but her smile was a little more confident.

Finally, Nirill got on her tiptoes to envelop the taller woman in a crushing embrace, whispering something in her ear. When she stood back again, Jo activated her helmet and stepped into the airlock without another word.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

As he watched Jo Trenton’s form drop out of sight beneath the rim of the ship, Cris felt utterly hollow. He longed to hole up in his quarters with a bottle of liquor, to numb all the doubts and fears and splintered memories that were leaving him cut up and raw. He did not want to wonder whether he just sent the young woman on a suicide mission to save the rest of them or whether all their efforts were pointless anyway, he just wanted to forget himself in the heady rush and bitter burn at the bottom of a glass.

Instead, he had to face two students who were looking up at him (looking up _to_ him!) with grim determination. The redhead was the first to break the silence. “What’s next, Captain?”

_‘What’s next, Cadet?’, Commander Hayett barked._

Cris took a deep breath. He could do this. He had done this hundreds of times before. Think through the problem! What was next?

_Identify possible pitfalls!_

Alright. Pitfalls. What could go wrong? Apart from everything, of course…

Cris stroked his beard. The most pressing problem was that the Venoxi could show up any minute. “We need to buy ourselves some time”, he decided. “How would the Venoxi know to come looking for a stranded ship?” It was a rhetorical question, an old Starfleet habit of voicing your thoughts so others could follow along and chime in. He had forgotten that he was surrounded by a bunch of students.

“There might be a beacon in the device.”, Nirill replied immediately.

“ _Not that I could see._ ”, Trenton answered over the comms.

“You focus on not falling off the ship!”, Cris snapped.

“ _Whatever._ ”

“ _I don’t remember seeing a beacon in the sensor readings, either_ ”, Yarvi’s voice concurred.

“They targeted our ship”, Ren said before Cris could get another word in. “They would have known our flight plan. Maybe they just calculated when we’d arrive?”

_“Unlikely”_ , one of the other students chimed in. “ _There’s a myriad things that might delay a ship on its way, you could be waiting around for days!_ ”

Nirill cocked her head. “They hacked _Sirena’s_ communications; they might be sending out a signal that way?”

“That’s definitely what I would do”, Cris agreed.

The fourth student added: “ _And there might be sensor stations hidden in that debris field that alert the Venoxi when someone approaches._ ”

Cris nodded.

_Once you know what might derail your plan, find a way to work around it!_

“So, if we want to make sure the pirates don’t find us until we re-establish control, we need to temporarily disable _Sirena‘s_ communications array and find some way to remain undetected by any proximity sensors.”

“ _Ah._ ” Yarvi’s voice sounded strangely apologetic. “ _Captain, Professor Mtumbe, might I ask you to come to the bridge? I may have a solution for both those problems…_ ”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“ _¡La madre que te parió!_ What the fuck did you do to my ops console?!”

Professor Mtumbe could understand Captain Rios’s sentiment, even if he did not condone his language. The right side of the two bridge control stations looked like a whole family of small burrowing creatures had chosen to colonize it. The glossy screen was cracked open and colourful wires, gleaming plasma conduits, and small metal objects were sticking out at every angle, littering the floor, bursting from the underside of the console, and some were even draped lovingly over the operations chair.

Yarvi gave the captain a noncommittal shrug. “Cal and I rewired weapons control so it would bypass the automatic systems and could be operated manually. I thought it might come in handy.”

“You…” Rios was clearly speechless.

The colonist used the opportunity to turn to Mtumbe. “Professor, I think somebody mentioned you had a myrion scanner among your equipment?”

“Um… Yes, we do. It’s a slightly older model, though…”

“Even better.” Yarvi turned back to Captain Rios. “Those machines use some highly unstable components. Or, well, components that become highly unstable if they are hit with strong enough phaser fire.”

Professor Mtumbe stared at the man in disbelief. “Why would you want to hit my scanner with phasers?”

“To make it explode, of course.” He said it as if it was the most natural idea in the world.

“ _You want to fly the ship through a myrion particle-explosion?_ ” Jo Trenton’s voice over the comms sounded delighted. _“That’s ingenious!_ ”

“What did I tell you about focusing?!”, Captain Rios snapped.

_“It is, though! It would disrupt communications and make us indistinguishable from the background radiation in this system. Just need someone with incredibly good aim to launch the scanner out in front of the ship!_ ”

“Now wait just a moment”, Professor Mtumbe said, trying to keep up. “You are suggesting we physically throw a piece of scanner technology overboard, so it ends up in front of the ship, shoot at it with hot-wired phaser banks and fly through the resulting explosion?”

Yarvi nodded. “Essentially, yes.” He was acting like this was an entirely mundane suggestion and not the most ludicrous plan anyone had ever come up with.

To Mtumbe’s shock, Rios looked like he was actually considering it. “Wouldn’t the explosion and radiation be dangerous for Trenton if she’s still out on the hull?”, the captain asked. “The idea is to buy her more time, not kill her.”

Yarvi cocked his head slightly. “It would only be a very small explosion and the radiation is mostly harmless.”

“ _Nothing your EMH can’t fix once we have control of the ship back_ ”, Ms Trenton added.

“ _If_ we get control of the ship back”, Mtumbe said, feeling somebody needed to be the voice of reason in this absurd spectacle.

“If we don’t, she’ll be dead within the hour anyway.” Everyone turned to look at Cal. The young musician was cowering in the navigator’s chair, legs drawn up to his chest and arms slung around them. He had not moved or spoken since Mtumbe had gotten to the bridge and even now his dark eyes, which seemed even more shadowed than usual, were fixed on something outside the front screen rather than on any of them. The dead, hollow sound of his usually so musical voice made the professor shiver.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Yarvi turned back to Rios. “Captain?”

Something in the captain’s expression had shifted. His eyes looked as far away and troubled as Cal’s and he did not react until Yarvi called his name more insistently. “What?” Rios sounded irritable but at least his gaze focused back on the here and now.

“We’ll reach the debris field in under fifteen minutes”, Yarvi said, still exceptionally calm. “Are we doing this?”

Rios nodded slowly and at that signal, Professor Mtumbe felt his anxiety settle into resigned acceptance. He had spent enough time in various committee-meetings around College and the Faculty to know when any further argument was pointless, and you had to simply follow along with whatever tomfoolery the Powers That Be decreed. Apparently, they were going to haul an old scanner out into space to blow it up, and if that was the plan, he would contribute what he could.

Ms Trenton had said, they needed someone with impeccable aim. Professor Mtumbe sighed and activated his comm badge. “Mr Inar, are you still in your EV suit?”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Ren felt his heart beat too fast in his chest. The brace around his knee was stiff and awkward under the heavy suit and made walking difficult, but at least he _could_ walk. Next to him, Cal had stopped again, staring at the spectacle ahead. _La Sirena_ was headed straight for one of the broken planets. The red light of one of the binary stars spilled through the jagged tears and gaps between monumental fragments, giving it an eerie look that even the usually unflappable Ren found unsettling. But they had no time to waste!

“Hey”, Ren said softly, tugging on the handle of the crate they were carrying between them. Cal jerked at the motion and looked at him, dark eyes wide with unreadable emotions. “Not much farther.”

Cal nodded, a little vague, and started walking again.

“ _That’s the last of the bolts_ ”, Jo announced over the intercom. “ _Starting to place the charges._ ”

“ _Excellent_ ”, Sophie replied. She had once again taken on the role of coordinator, directing their moves and keeping them apprised of what was happening on the ship. “ _Cal, Ren, it’s just a few more yards to your right. See the end of that red strip? That should be the ideal location!”_

“Copy that”, Ren replied. He looked over at Cal, whose mind seemed miles away. Ren had heard a few stories about the Venoxi, and he understood why the prospect of running into them was so upsetting to their Betazoid companion. Not to mention what being telepathically tuned in to everybody else’s panic must be doing to him. Ren suppressed a shudder and tried to push his most optimistic side to the forefront of his mind. “Hey Cal”, he said, his cheerfulness only slightly forced, “Remember that epic ballad you sang a couple nights ago about… who was it again?”

Cal shot him a quick look, before staring ahead again. “ _Cantro the Magnificent, Hero of Inistra?_ ”

“Yeah, him! Do you think once we heroically get ourselves out of this mess, you can write a song about us, too?”

This time, Cal stared at him with clear confusion.

Ren grinned as they continued to shuffle on, towards the spot Sophie had described. “You know, the heroics of Mtumbe the Wise and his Intrepid Scholars.”

There was a giggle over the comm link and Nirill piped up: “ _Jo the Valiant, Crusher of Alien Devices!_ ”

Jo snorted and joined in: “ _Ren the Steady-Handed, Holder of Hyperspanners and Thrower of Scanners!_ ”

“Cal the Brave”, Ren continued, but before he could come up with a fitting epithet, Sophie talked over him.

“ _Guys, we really don’t have time for this._ ” Ren was sure he could make out angry swearing in a strange language in the background as she spoke.

He winked at Cal who looked a fraction less like he was about to faint.

“ _It’s alright_ ”, the musician said quietly, “ _we just reached the edge of the red paint_.”

Ren looked down and sure enough, they were standing in the exact middle of the ship’s underside, the hull gently sloping down in front of them. All sense of joviality disappeared in the blink of an eye, leaving behind only tension and cold dread.

Rios came on over the comm. “ _Ren, you know what to do!_ ”

“Sure, Captain.” His voice sounded unnaturally high in his own ears.

“ _Take a deep breath and focus. You can do this!_ ”

A part of Ren desperately wished to be anywhere else right now. Why oh why did he have to distinguish himself in the eyes of his professor not through his academic excellence but through his ability to throw small objects with high precision? Was it his fault that so many of his classmates chose to adopt these ridiculous nest-like braided hairstyles last year that practically begged to be used for target practice?

He followed the captain’s advice, taking a few steadying breaths while Cal wrestled with the latch on the crate. The myrion scanner was a metallic ball, a little smaller than a head, with a number of thick wires protruding from various points around its circumference. Just like a bigger slingball. This would be fine!

Cal looked up at him, expression still a little distant. “ _Are you ready?_ ”

Ren swallowed, then he nodded. “Let’s do this!”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Jo could not help but watch as Ren picked up the small machine by its sturdy data cables and started swinging it around. He was using it like a slingshot, but she could easily picture him in a hammer throw competition at one of the festivals her mother had taken her to as a child. She just hoped he actually knew what he was doing.

For a few tense moments, Ren simply stood there, the acceleration of the metal ball increasingly tugging his arm up and down as he spun his wrist — and then he let go. The little scanner sped away along the underside of the ship. Its dark mass was easy to distinguish from _Sirena’s_ white and red paint as it skimmed along, getting closer and closer to the hull.

“ _Oh no._ ” Ren’s voice sounded dead and Jo felt every muscle in her body tense as the scanner inched ever closer to the tritanium plating. There were only a few more meters before it would clear the front of the ship but that was all it took. The small machine connected with the hull, but through some miracle, the angle of impact had been flat enough that the scanner did not bounce violently off course. Instead, it slid along the tritanium plates, leaving behind a dark skid mark. Jo was glad she could not hear the metallic shriek, even the thought set her teeth on edge. After scraping along to the front edge of the ship, the scanner continued its trajectory steadily up and ahead of them.

Jo let out a whistling breath of relief and a triumphant whoop made her look back to the middle of the ship where Ren had apparently recovered from his near-miss and was doing a little victory dance.

“ _What are you two idiots doing standing around there?_ ” Rios’s harsh tone could not completely mask the relief in his voice. “ _Get back inside!_ ”

Jo smirked and turned back to her task. Rios might be an ill-tempered, overbearing ignoramus sometimes, but he had his moments.

“ _Trenton, update!_ ” Aaaand moment ruined. Did he _have_ to check up on her every two minutes?!

“Three more charges to go”, she replied as she peeled one of them off her tool belt and started wedging it into the slit around the slightly loosened tritanium plate.

“ _Hurry up, please_.”

Jo scoffed. “Focus on shooting that scanner, please!”

Rios grumbled something unintelligible but made no further reply.

“See how annoying that is?”, Jo muttered under her breath. She tried to shove the little explosive further down and stifled a curse as her fingers cramped painfully. She was used to working on fiddly mechanical problems for hours, even with thick protective gloves, but prying off even a few of the very secure bolts had taken a lot of strength. _Obviously_ , she reminded herself. _Those things are meant to keep the hull plating on a warp-capable spaceship in place!_

Jo allowed herself a frustrated growl, stretching and curling her fingers to revive them, then she got back to work.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Cris took a deep breath and placed his hand on the rickety construction in front of him. “You’re sure?”

Yarvi gave him a long look, but his voice was still patient as he replied: “Yes, Captain, I’m very sure.”

Cris nodded but still made no attempt to activate the makeshift weapons control. He had insisted on manning the phasers himself. This was his fucking ship; he was not going to let his passengers take it all away from him in the course of a single afternoon!

“ _Captain Rios?_ ” Bele’s calm voice shook him out of his annoyance.

“What is it?”

“ _We’re detecting increased electrical activity among the wrecks. Not enough for a ship but might be a satellite._ ”

“Copy that.”

Yarvi raised an eyebrow at him. “Now or never, Captain.”

Cris set his jaw. There were a million things that could still go wrong with this plan, but it was their best shot. The graveyard of stripped ships was looming large across the viewscreen and if the archaeologists’ modified scanners had found a satellite out there, they needed to get the ship undetectable right now.

He curled the fingers of his right hand around the unfamiliar control stick, calling the construction to life. Some of the wires sprouting out of the cracked console sparked in truly alarming fashion, but Yarvi did not seem concerned, so Cris decided to follow his lead. He placed his left hand on the little mechanical trigger — barely more than a glorified relay switch — and took another deep breath. “ _Ahora o nunca_ ”, he whispered and then he shot.

The phaser bank ignited with an orange glow and a very narrow beam shot out, missing the tiny scanner by a significant margin.

Before Cris could ask, Yarvi said: “Ah. I narrowed the phaser band, so the energy discharge would be less noticeable. Would you like me to…”

“I’ve got it”, Cris shot back. Though he clearly did not. His next shot went wide in the other direction and Cris swore. When it came down to it, he was a pilot, not a marksman.

“ _The electrical signal is growing stronger, Captain. Whatever it is, it’s coming online fast!_ ”

Cris focused on the feeling of the control stick in his right hand. It was not too dissimilar from the flight controls he used to steer _La Sirena_ , a similar range of motion, a similar resistance and torque. He visualized his two previous misses and imagined he was trying to manoeuvre his ship to the point right in between those. If he twisted his hand ever so slightly like _this_ …

The next shot hit dead centre.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

The small explosion was barely noticeable against the rapidly approaching chaos of broken and dismembered starships, illuminated by the unsteady red light shimmering through planetary fragments. Jo had to admit it was an awe-inspiring sight. She tried to keep an eye out for any shrapnel speeding towards her from the disintegrated scanner, but it was hard to make out anything specific. She did, however, notice when the wave of released radiation rolled over her, because the excited voices discussing the successful shot over the open commlink drowned in noisy static.

Jo sighed and picked the last charge off her tool belt. With any luck, the radiation would keep them hidden for long enough to restart the systems and get out of here! She really did not want to be caught in a space battle. Again.

It took forever to place the final charge and by the end, she was sure her fingers must be bleeding inside the gloves form all the pressure and friction, but she did it. She called up the remote-control trigger on the holodisplay built into the EV-suit’s forearm-monitor and took a few measured steps back.

“Rios?” Jo listened carefully to the static blaring on the communications channel. “Rios, come in!” She thought she heard distorted voices, but it might have just been her mind playing tricks. “Ren?”, she tried instead, hoping the shorter distance to the airlock might make the connection better. “Niri? Cal? Does anyone read me?”

“ _Jo?_ ” Despite the horrible sound quality Jo recognized Niri’s voice instantly and smiled.

“I’m about to blow out the plating”, she said, enunciating every syllable as clearly as possible. “Tell Rios to prepare for reboot!”

“ _… will… hi… boot…_ ”

Jo hesitated a moment, then she shrugged. Rios was hopefully clever enough to prepare already and if her message had not gone through, she could just repeat it while she was heading back to the airlock until someone copied. With a small, self-indulgent flourish, Jo raised her finger to the holodisplay and pressed the trigger, already mentally preparing her return hike.

Nothing happened.

She frowned and pressed the button again.

Still nothing.

“What on earth?” Jo lunged forward and threw herself into a crouch next to the slightly raised hull plate. She managed to dig one of the small black disks out from where she had painstakingly placed it only moments ago and stared at it. The control lights had turned off. She picked the small scanner from her belt and ran it over the explosive. There was some interference, but the reading left no room for doubt: The radiation had fried the microcharge’s unshielded control circuits.

“Jesus sufferin' _fuck!_ ”

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

“Trenton, come in!” Cris slammed his hand on the console in frustration, making the small tray of data crystals jingle. He took a step back from the delicate machine and tried to calm down. “Does anyone have a read on Trenton?”

One of the students who were manning the scanner replied: “ _She’s walking back and forth near the device. She’s probably still working._ ”

“She should have been done by now!” He touched his comm badge again. “Trenton, do you copy!”

“… _ios…_ ” The static was deafening but he was sure he had heard an answer. “ _…iation… …ssipati… Rios?_ ”

“Trenton? What’s going on?”

The white noise seemed to die down very slowly, probably as the initial burst of radiation started to disperse, but it was still difficult to understand the answering transmission. “ _… little snag… …crocharges… fried …_ ”

A block of ice dropped into Cris’s stomach. “Say that again?”

“ _… control circuits for… …ges are fried, I can’t… …remotely, but I have a…_ ”

Blood started to rush in Cris’s ears, mixing with the static. “Trenton, what are you doing?” He did not hear all of her explanation, but the words ‘plasma ducts’ and ‘trigger manually’ came through loud and clear.

“Are you completely out of your mind?!”, Cris yelled, pressing his fists against the wall to steady himself. “The explosion would be massive!”

“ _I sent Niri … shut off the plasma conduit from … damage will be limited to the hull._ ”

“ _You’re_ on the goddamn hull, _hija_!”

“ _The access hatch a few meters back opens outwards. I’ll use … as shielding. I’ll be fine._ ” But her voice was lacking some of its usual conviction.

Cris shook his head. “You can’t do this, it’s way too dangerous! The tether will never hold, and you’ll be blown into space! There has to be another way!”

“ _Redirecting plasma flow now._ ”

“Trenton!”

“ _This will work. And you can get the ship back under control. Opening the access hatch._ ”

“Trenton, don’t do this!!”

There was a long pause. “ _Make sure you get everyone safely to Bajor, Captain._ ”

“ _Jo!!_ ” Cris turned around and ran to the door but before he had taken more than a couple of steps, an explosion rocked the ship.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Ahora o nunca._ \- "Now or never"
> 
> **Alternative title:** Murphy's Pirate Attack
> 
> (The conclusion to this little adventure will be posted on Friday, 8th May '20, around 7pm CET ;9 )


	7. Aftermath

_Blinding light burning into the back of her eyes._

_Heat engulfing her, throwing her backwards._

_Pain. So much pain._

_Voices shouting her name._

_Darkness._

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Everything was warm and soft.

People were talking in hushed tones somewhere far away. Their words blurred together into a gentle, calming hum that was periodically interrupted by an incredibly annoying beeping sound. As the individual voices started to differentiate and become clearer, the beeping grew more regular and louder as well. Whose stupid idea was it to take such a wonderful, soft, warm place and add a horrible beeping noise to it?

She frowned.

“Jo?” The word was no more than a whisper, but it sent a bolt of lightning through her brain and the beeping sped up. She forced her eyes open ( _eyes, she still had eyes!_ ) and after blinking a few times to get the sand out of them, she finally managed to zero in on the source of the whisper. Everything was blurry, but the pale face surrounded by a halo of fiery hair was unmistakable.

“Niri?”

She was rewarded with a musical laugh that sounded very… wet. “Hey, welcome back.” Niri squeezed her hand ( _she also still had hands! How curious…_ ).

Jo tried to look around but moving her eyes caused too much pain and she groaned.

“Easy”, a familiar voice said in a strange accent. “Your retinas were damaged in the explosion and still need time to recover.”

It took Jo a moment to sort through the muddle in her brain. “Rios?”, she finally asked. “Why d’you sound all southern ‘n’ posh?”

“I’m the Emergency Medical Hologram”, not-Rios replied. “You’re in sickbay.”

“Huh.” She tried to rub a hand over her eyes, but her arm did not obey her command.

“Is she awake?” The excited voice from her right sounded familiar, but Jo could not place it. She turned her head laboriously and blinked again. Someone was sitting up on a cot nearby, a blob of dark hair against the bright wall.

“Ren?”, she croaked.

A familiar triumphant shout made her ears ring and was closely followed by posh-Rios’s voice saying: “I wasn’t joking about that sedative, Mr Inar, settle down!”

“Sorry”, Ren said and quickly lay back down. On Jo’s other side, Niri giggled, the sound higher and thinner than usual.

Jo’s eyes still felt like they had sand in them but before she closed them, she noticed movement somewhere in the region of her feet.

“I have to say, Ms Trenton, that was quite the stunt you pulled!” Even in her dazed state there was no way to mistake the professor’s bass.

“What…” Jo tried to remember the last moments before waking up, but there was only a lot of darkness and pain. She shivered and the annoying beeping grew faster again. “What happened?”, she asked.

“You blew yourself up.” Niri’s quiet voice was full of emotion that Jo could not parse right now.

“I… yes, I mean… after.”

There was a moment of silence and then four people started talking at once.

“… the tether was torn of course and…”

“… took forever to bring the systems online!”

“… a miracle the suit stayed intact…”

“We weren’t sure we’d get the transporter signal through the radiation…”

“… adjusted the scanner for biomass…”

“… never heard the professor swear like that!”

“… Rios was yelling at the Engineering Hologram the entire time…”

She tried to make sense of their jumbled words, but it all blurred together in her mind. Finally, the EMH’s stern voice cut through the din. “That’s enough, my patients need to rest. Everyone who is no longer injured, out!” There was a murmur of dissent, but the voices retreated slowly. “You too, Ms Takuhn.”

Jo only noticed now that Niri was still holding her hand. “Oh, please, Emil, can’t I stay with them, just for a little while longer?” Her voice sounded soft and pleading and Jo could just picture the corresponding wide-eyed look.

The EMH - Emil - _tsk_ ed, but nobody could resist Niri in full puppy-dog mode. “Alright but see that you don’t agitate either of them. Radiation poisoning is no laughing matter.”

Jo frowned and turned her head towards Ren, though she did not try to open her eyes this time. “How’d you end up… radi… radiation… radiatiated?”

Ren huffed. “I didn’t make it back inside before the captain shot down the scanner.”

“Oh.” Something was nudging her mind, but it took a moment to register. “Cal?”

“He’s fine!”, Ren said quickly.

Niri added: “He got to the airlock first. Ren helped him climb in just as the captain started shooting so he was shielded from the blast.”

“Ren the Steady-Handed”, Jo mumbled. She could feel the edges of her consciousness fraying again, but there was one more question she needed to ask. “Captain Rios?”

Niri hesitated before she answered. “He was here, briefly, just after they transported you back on board, but he left again. I think he was pretty angry.”

Jo nodded. She thought she heard Rios — no, Emil — sigh quietly, but then she slipped back into warm, soft darkness, only occasionally interrupted by an annoying, steady beeping.

\---------------------- o O o ----------------------

Yarvi had done a hell of a job rewiring the phasers. Cris had been working on putting everything back in its place for nearly two hours now and so far, he had untangled maybe half of the rerouted wires, which was nothing compared to the ingenious bit of engineering he would have to revert to restore the targeting sensors to proper order. If he wanted to have all of his systems operational again by the morning, he would probably have to work through the night. Granted, the half bottle of _aguardiente_ currently coursing through his veins did not help to speed up matters, but it _did_ help to take the edge off what had been a truly exhausting day.

Once the excitement had died down a bit, Yarvi had offered to help him repair the ops console, as had Ian, but Cris had rebuffed them both. For one thing, the colonist’s familiarity and ease in moulding _Sirena’s_ weapons array to his wishes was deeply troubling, and the EEH was needed to fix all the other systems around the ship that had fallen victim to the Venoxi device’s random power spikes. For another, Cris wanted to do this work himself.

He hated to admit it, but the events of the day had left him deeply shaken. It had been a long, _long_ time since he’d been responsible for anyone but himself. (Except occasionally Raffi, of course, but Raffi was family, that was different.) The moment when Jo had detonated that plasma and her communicator had cut off…

_Red flashes crept into the corner of Cris’s vision and his heart started to swell and accelerate in his chest. Yellow eyes stared up at him, unseeing, betrayed. Angry shouting reverberated in his ears. And in front of him –_

NO!

Cris took a deep, steadying breath and concentrated on his surroundings. The metal floor of _Sirena’s_ bridge was cool against his back. The tangle of wires and electrical components above him was tangible, was _real_ , was something he could fix right here and now with his own two hands. He let out another slow breath and felt his heartrate return to a more normal range.

A sudden silence caught his attention and it took him a moment to remember why. The EMH had stopped talking. _Damn_ that holographic nuisance and his access to the ship’s bio scanners! From where he was lying under the ops console, Cris could only see the EMH’s legs propped up on a box next to the captain’s chair. It irked him that the hologram had taken that particular seat like he felt entitled to it, but that was a discussion they would have some other time. Right now, he needed to get the EMH back on topic before the hologram decided to enquire into his captain’s sudden heart palpitations.

“You were saying?”, Cris prompted gruffly.

The EMH hesitated another moment but then he continued his slightly plaintive report. “Mr Inar’s radiation poisoning was only minor, and he has responded very well to treatment, so I sent him to sleep it off in his quarters. Ms Tachibana and Ms Delon, as well as Professor Mtumbe suffered minor burns when their generator overloaded but nothing too concerning, and I treated Cal for a sprained wrist.” The hologram simulated an exasperated sigh.

“And you’re telling me all this because?”

The EMH’s haughty tone complimented his prissy English accent in the worst way as he huffed: “It _is_ standard protocol to update the captain of a vessel on the medical status of his crew after an emergency.”

“They are _not_ my crew!”, Cris snapped, a little too forceful.

He could practically hear the hologram rolling his eyes. “Forgive me, the medical status of the people currently occupying the crew quarters, who worked under you as an effective unit to save the ship from an imminent crisis.”

Cris growled, trying to stop his hands from shaking. They were _not_ his crew! He had sworn that he would never have a crew again.

He could see the EMH sitting up in his chair. “Captain?” The sudden gentle concern in the hologram’s voice was too much for Cris. He wanted him off his bridge!

“Shouldn’t you be in sickbay, babysitting Trenton?”, he pressed out between clenched teeth.

The EMH was not deterred by this very blunt attempt at diversion. “Ms Takuhn is currently sitting with her, she’ll let me know if my help is needed.”

“Who?”

“Nirill Takuhn? One of Professor Mtumbe’s students?”

“Ah.” Cris liked the little redhead, she had proven to be pretty calm and collected throughout this crisis. But if she was watching Trenton, that meant… “You’re saying they don’t need you in sickbay right now?”

“No”, the EMH confirmed and added gently: “so if there’s anything you need, I’d be happy to –”

“Deactivate EMH!”

Cris allowed himself a darkly satisfied smile as the hologram’s legs disappeared. For a while, he just continued to work on the console, letting his hands and mind occupy themselves with the intricate puzzle that was restoring normal functionality. At some point, he saw Cal shuffle through his fields of vision on the way to the lower deck. The musician stopped at the top of the stairs and hesitated for a moment, turning in Cris’s direction, but then he continued on without a word. Soon after, the gentle sounds of a simple melody played beautifully on the lyre drifted up from the mess hall.

Cris considered briefly whether he should say something, but the thought of engaging with any of his passengers tonight exhausted him, and the music was so quiet it would not penetrate _Sirena’s_ thick bulkheads and wake anyone. And if the EMH was concerned about the noise disturbing the sleeping Trenton, well that was his fucking problem.

The thought of Jo, burned, broken, and lifeless in the glaring light of sickbay made Cris shiver again. But it also reminded him of something, and he quickly latched on to the distraction. “Emmet”, he called quietly.

The hologram appeared in the captain’s chair the EMH had vacated earlier. “ _¿Qué quieres?_ ”, he drawled, sounding sleepy and disinterested as always. Cris had to suppress another shiver. Usually he enjoyed the opportunity to talk to someone in his native Spanish, especially Emmet whose cadence and general attitude reminded him so much of some of the people from his childhood. But tonight, the familiar sounds grated on his mind, like a myriad of tiny splinters.

“I think we don’t need to surveil Jo Trenton after all”, he declared in English.

Thankfully, Emmet picked up on the cue and switched languages as well. “You trust her now?”

“She did just heroically sacrifice herself for the survival of everyone on this ship.” Fucking little martyr. “I think that should buy her a little trust.”

“Hm.” Emmet did not sound convinced, but that was part of his job after all. His paranoia could rival Raffi’s sometimes.

“But we should come up with a different override for the next time someone tries to lock me out of _Sirena’s_ systems!”

“I said you should do voice override. It’s much safer!”

“But it would have to be something simple enough that I definitely remember it, no matter…” Cris only just stopped the words ‘no matter how drunk I am’ from leaving his mouth, though Emmet’s little snort told him the hologram had made the inference anyway. He swallowed a couple of choice invectives and instead continued: “And it would have to be obscure enough that nobody could stumble upon it by accident.”

Cris and Emmet started throwing ideas around, and the longer the night drew on, the more absurd the suggestions became. The newly filled bottle of liquor that appeared at some point next to Cris’s head (had he called for that? Or had it been Emmet?) did not help to steer their brainstorming into more sober directions and before long, they had moved on from catchphrases of long-forgotten holo-dramas and were competing to see who could string together the most creative collection of Spanish expletives.

And all the while, the bridge was filled with the gentle sounds of Cal, down in the mess hall, playing sweet lullabies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to know what Cris and Emmet eventually come up with, you’ll have to watch _Star Trek: Picard_ , S01E08 “Broken Pieces”.
> 
> **Next Time on _Star Trek: La Sirena_ :** Captain Rios is forced to dock his ship at a small starbase for repairs where encounters with old friends and new problems threaten to tear our rag-tag group apart.
> 
> ——————————————————————————————————
> 
> And thus we reach the end of the first episode. A huge thanks to everyone who has stuck with this little story and left kudos and comments or just enjoyed the read. I never thought writing for actual readers beside myself could be so much fun, but you’ve made it quite the ride!
> 
> Of course, the biggest thanks goes to Horizon, without whose help and joy and encouragement none of this would have happened! Let me flog [her art](https://horizonproblems.tumblr.com/) one final time.
> 
> I’m gonna keep going with this, but the second episode is currently still in production, so it’ll be a while before I start posting that. In the meantime, there will probably be some small Interludes (what we in the business call “Short Treks” *coughs*) of the mostly plotless one-shot slice of life variety, because I really like these characters and a lot of their day to day shenanigans does not make it into the more structured episodes. I hope you’ll find these little excursions entertaining as well, and they’ll tide you over while we all wait for episode 2 to finish. (Magically. On its own. Please? :D)
> 
> On a final note, I’ve been investigating the layout of _La Sirena_ as depicted on the show and have found some interesting details! (Which, among other things, means I’ll probably have to go back to chapter 2 at some point to edit the locations a bit *sighs*). I've started posting about that [over on tumblr](https://mappinglasirena.tumblr.com/post/617856464553426944/mapping-la-sirena), so come check it out if this is something that might interest you as well.
> 
> Once again, a huge thanks and I shall see you in the comments! <3


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